
Class 

. 



COPYRIGHT DEIHDSrT. 



THE RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

OF AN 

AMERICAN CITIZEN 



gh&& $o 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

N*W YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS 
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 

TORONTO 



THE RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

OF AN 

AMERICAN CITIZEN 



BY 
FRANCIS GREENWOOD PEABODY 

Plummer Professor of Christian Morals (Emeritus) 
in Harvard University 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1917 

All rightt rmrvid 



' 






INK 



Copyright, 1917 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 



Set up and electrotyped. Published, June, 1917. 



\ 






JUN 28 1917 
70098 



NOW WE SEE IN A MIRROR 
BUT THEN FACE TO FACE 

i do not doubt, dear wife, that we shall prove 

somewhere, somehow, the timelessness of love; 

that, through the labyrinth of time and space, 

i shall be led to see you face to face; 

and, seeking peace, shall, with a glad surprise, 

find it, as ever, in your peaceful eyes. 

yet, from these hopes, unrealized though sweet, 

which beckon and allure, but still retreat, 

i turn to see their image standing fast 

upon the unclouded mirror of the past. 

i see you there, consoling, patient, kind, 

to faults forgiving and to follies blind; 

i watch you there, through busy works and days, 

unmoved by thanklessness, unspoiled by praise; 

most happy when most silent and unseen, 

yet in the world sagacious and serene, 

and winning the beholder to confess 

the conquering charm of self-forgetfulness. 

i see you still above your flowers bend, 

each shoot to straighten and each bud to tend; 

until, as by persuasion from above, 

your garden yields its answer to your love. 

and, standing by your side, i dimly see 

the Son of Man in his benignity, 

training your will, as you have trained your flowers, 

to bear life's chilling storms and sultry hours; 

and smiling as he sees the unconscious grace 

which shyly lifts itself to meet his face. 

if in the magic mirror of our life 

such images remain, beloved wife; 

if two wills, made so diverse, grew to be 

miraculously merged in unity; 

if on my memory sinks this cloudless sun, 

and happy years defy oblivion; 

if i have had this glimpse through heaven's gate, 

SHALL I NOT PATIENTLY BELIEVE, AND WAIT? 



. 



INTRODUCTORY NOTE 

The purpose of this series of loosely con- 
nected chapters is to call attention to some 
of the influences which direct, and some of the 
qualities which mark, the religious education 
of an American citizen. The normal life of 
an American proceeds from childhood to youth 
and from youth to manhood, through the shift- 
ing environments of home, school, college, busi- 
ness, citizenship and Church; and at each step 
he is met by conditions and demands which may 
either promote or obstruct his religious educa- 
tion. What, then, are the circumstances which 
are likely to be most favorable for a healthy- 
minded and progressive religious experience? 
What can be done by parents, teachers, em- 
ployers, statesmen, or pastors, to reinforce 
American citizenship with a rational religious 
life? What are the special obstacles which 
American civilization offers to religious prog- 
ress? What are the traits of the American 
character on which teachers of religion may 
most confidently depend? 

These questions lead one quite beyond the 
region of technical administration or ecclesias- 

vii 



Introductory Note 

tical authority. They are not concerned with 
catechisms, or Sunday-schools, or Church mem- 
bership. All this mechanism of organization 
and instruction, indispensable though it is, as- 
sumes a susceptibility in pupils or in converts 
to religious motives, a responsiveness to re- 
ligious truth, a thirst for the living God, a rest- 
lessness of human nature until it finds rest in 
Him. The mechanism is designed to utilize and 
convey spiritual power, to develope and direct 
instead of checking or wasting it, and the inven- 
tion and regulation of such machinery is the 
business of religious engineers. But the power 
itself, as it flows from the high places of hu- 
man experience down to the plains of daily life, 
is the essential prerequisite of effective engineer- 
ing, the source of that energy which turns the 
wheels of the Church. How to conserve that 
force, how to store it at its remote and hidden 
sources, how to keep it clear from taint and 
secure its abundant and unobstructed flow, — 
this is the problem of religious education. It 
lies, as it were, higher up among the hills of 
life than any determination of doctrinal con- 
formity or ecclesiastical practices, and on its 
vitality and force the efficiency of these opera- 
tions must ultimately depend. 

These considerations lead one to explore, in 
viii 



Introductory Note 

one and another direction, the conditions and 
institutions of American life among which the 
stream of religious experience has its origin, 
and from which its course must be directed. 
How shall these influences be so cleansed and 
freed from obstruction that the water of life 
may flow freely down? Can the inevitable cir- 
cumstances of American citizenship be made a 
purified medium of religious education? What 
are the defects, and what are the virtues of the 
American character of which religious teach- 
ing should take account? These are ques- 
tions to which answers are at the present time 
eagerly and even feverishly sought by many 
thoughtful minds. In the following Papers, oc- 
casional for the most part in their origin and 
fragmentary in their form, it is not pretended 
that this high task of interpretation is fulfilled. 
They represent nothing more than exploratory 
excursions which, as on some tramp among the 
hills, may find here and there a living spring, 
and clear away some of the rubbish which 
checks it, leaving the current unimpeded and 
free. It is for the more expert hands of the- 
ological engineers to harness the stream into 
their enterprises and to convert incidental ob- 
servations into systematic schemes. 



IX 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

Introductory Note vii 

CHAPTER I 

The Religious Education of an American Child . . i 

CHAPTER II 
The American Boy and His Home 18 

CHAPTER III 
The Religion of a College Student 31 

CHAPTER IV 
The Universities and the Social Conscience ... 56 

CHAPTER V 

The Religious Education of an American Citizen . 74 

CHAPTER VI 
The American Character 93 

CHAPTER VII 
Discipline no 

CHAPTER VIII 
Power 123 

CHAPTER IX 
Perspective 141 



Contexts 

CHAPTER X PAGE 

The Expansion of Religion 158 

CHAPTER XI 
The Conversion of Militarism 174 

CHAPTER XII 
The Place of Jesus Christ in a Religious Experience . 196 



THE RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 
OF AN AMERICAN CITIZEN 



I 



THE RELIGIOUS EDUCATION OF AN 
AMERICAN CHILD 

What, to begin at the beginning, are the cir- 
cumstances and principles which should be re- 
called in undertaking the religious education of 
an American child? The question does not 
have in mind either the theological education of 
a sceptical child, or the catechetical education 
of a restless child, or the moral education of a 
wayward child, or the eugenic education of an 
unsymmetrical child, however important and 
timely all these pedagogical enterprises may be. 
These types of education are amply, even if 
not judiciously, provided for. The catechisms 
enumerate to children the terms of salvation 
and the contents of Scripture; the discipline of 
schools, churches, homes, laws and customs pro- 
motes moral conformity, even if not moral 

I 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

initiative; and the laws of health, hygiene, and 
heredity, even if not scrupulously obeyed, are 
at least widely understood. Religious educa- 
tion, however, is not primarily concerned either 
with the order of Old Testament books, or with 
the travels of Paul, or with good manners and 
social propriety, or with the raising of better 
stocks by physical selection and stall-fed virtue. 
It is concerned, on the one hand, with religion, 
and with religion not as doctrine or conformity, 
but as the conscious association of a human soul 
with the will of God; and it is concerned, on the 
other hand, with education, and with education 
not as instruction, or the building up of a struc- 
ture of beliefs, but as the " educing," or draw- 
ing out, as the word implies, the latent facul- 
ties of the child into consciousness and efficiency. 
It assumes, in other words, that a normal child 
has in him the germ of a religious nature; that 
he is not a child of wrath, " conceived and born 
in sin," and regenerated through baptism, but a 
child of grace, to whom it is as natural under 
favoring circumstances to be religious as it is 
for a flower in a garden to bloom, and whose 
capacities and tendencies Jesus rightly inter- 
preted when he told his disciples that unless 
they became as little children they could not 
enter the Kingdom of Heaven. The problem 

2 



Religious Education of an American Child 

of religious education, therefore, is that of pro- 
viding a soil, climate, and nurture which may 
11 educe " this natural growth, and of removing 
the accumulation of artificiality, unreality, and 
rubbish which may hinder this natural evolu- 
tion. 

To this general problem of religious educa- 
tion is further added its special application to 
the American child. There are, of course, 
many kinds of children in the United States, 
and different circumstances call for diversity 
and flexibility in education. But precisely as 
there has issued from this melting-pot of the 
nations a kind of citizen which is recognizable 
as the American type, so there is discernible be- 
hind all diversities of race, color, urban and 
rural life, economic prosperity and want, a nor- 
mal and typical child whom the institutions and 
conditions of American life tend to produce. 
This typical child is bred neither in luxury nor 
in destitution; it is neither illiterate nor highly 
cultivated; it is neither depraved nor perfect; 
neither a tough nor a saint. It represents 
those millions of children who have been born 
and reared in the average, bread-winning, and 
self-respecting American homes, and taught in 
the common schools; who have attended the 
neighboring church, are unspoiled by indulg- 

3 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

ence and unafraid of work, inclined to self- 
confidence and expectancy — in short, scions of 
the stock which has been grafted from many 
nations but has become rooted in the soil of 
the United States, and from which the great 
majority of our national leaders have sprung. 
How shall this American child, the normal 
product of American democracy, the child of a 
free school and a voluntary church, acquire a 
religious education? How shall the natural 
adaptation of its character to the sense of de- 
pendence, reverence and communion be nur- 
tured and drawn out? How shall it be saved 
from the conception of religion as an external, 
artificial and superimposed restraint, and be- 
come habitually conscious of a spiritual uni- 
verse with a purpose in it for the child's own 
life? In a word, how shall the American child 
grow progressively more conscious of the life 
of God in the soul of man, and approach 
that simplicity — or, as the Greek suggests, 
that single-mindedness — which is "toward 
Christ"? 

The answer to these questions must be first 
approached by recognizing that the religious ed- 
ucation of an American child begins much 
earlier in the child's life than most parents are 
apt to suppose. Many people regard the first 
4 



Religious Education of an American Child 

intimations of awe or adoration which their 
children express as amusing evidences of pre- 
cocity or imaginativeness, and passively await 
the time when through the suggestion of their 
pastor or through their own sense of fitness they 
may be moved to send their child to Sunday- 
school, where his religious education shall be- 
gin. The fact is, however, that the evolution 
or repression of the religious instinct has by 
that time been for years affected by the habits 
of the home, by the conduct of parents, by the 
tone and temper of family life, so that impulses 
and tendencies have been already promoted or 
checked, as a lingering winter retards, or a has- 
tening spring persuades, the timid flowers. Dr. 
Oliver Wendell Holmes once playfully said that 
the discipline of one's physical constitution 
should begin with the wise selection of one's 
grandparents; and it is not less certain that 
the religious education of a child is inseparable 
from the habitual conduct of parental life. If 
religion be postponed until it seem needed as an 
example; if levity, frivolity or carelessness rule 
the conversation or taste of the home; if days 
and nights be preoccupied with money-making 
and money-spending and the care of chil- 
dren delegated to hired guardians; then it 
should be no surprise that teachers and preach- 

5 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

ers find it difficult to make the spiritual life 
seem real or near, and that religion seems to 
children, as to their parents, an external form, 
rather than a personal experience. In short, 
the earliest communication of religion to a child 
is accomplished not by instruction but by con- 
tagion. Its approach is not didactic but at- 
mospheric; and the instincts and motives which 
even in maturity may prove most ineradicable 
and persuasive are likely to be those which have 
been unconsciously appropriated in the spiritual 
climate of a reverent and loving home. The 
problem of the child, in brief, is but one aspect 
of the problem of the family; and the preserva- 
tion of integrity and coherence in that unit 
of civilization provides the most fundamental 
problem of the modern world. " God setteth 
the solitary," it is written, " in families "; and 
that initial association into which the child by 
the conditions of human parentage and birth 
must enter, will be to him either the best of hu- 
man blessings or the most threatening of perils 
for his faith. 

To this period of unconscious assimilation, 
which is like the prenatal period in its effect on 
the future of the child, there succeeds a second 
period of conscious instruction and discipline. 
Where shall such instruction begin? At what 
6 



Religious Education of an American Child 

point does the religious nature of the child 
naturally bloom, as a spring flower breaks 
through the crust of sod? Here we meet the 
most persistent blunder of the churches in their 
conduct of religious education. Along with 
their habitual rendering of religion into terms 
of dogma, conformity and assent, has come the 
still more preposterous notion that the same 
intellectualizing process is desirable, or even 
possible, for the child. Instruction in religion 
has begun, as a rule, either with subjects of 
doctrine or with subjects of history. An or- 
thodox opinion concerning the nature of God 
and Christ, or a store of information about 
the Bible and the Church, or both, have as a 
rule made the material of catechisms and les- 
sons. Much intellectual profit may no doubt 
be gained from these acquisitions; and it is one 
of the misfortunes of modern life that so many 
children are pitifully uninformed about Chris- 
tian thought and Christian literature. But it 
must be remembered that a child may be thor- 
oughly instructed both in Christian doctrine and 
in Christian history and yet have acquired no 
religious education at all. A child may repeat 
without a slip all the articles of the Apostles' 
Creed without being saved thereby from a slip 
of character. A child may know the order of 

7 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

all the Epistles in the New Testament without 
becoming what the Apostle calls an Epistle of 
Christ, written with the spirit of the living God. 
In other words, information is not inspiration; 
creeds do not insure character; and religion is 
not orthodoxy but life. 

To this obvious fact should be further added 
the not less significant truth that this catechetical 
and theological approach to religious education 
fails to reach the real child. This is not the 
point where the nature of the child for the pres- 
ent happens to be. The child is neither a Ni- 
cene metaphysician nor a Biblical critic. When 
the catechism asks him, " What dost thou chiefly 
learn in these Articles of thy Belief? " and he 
answers, " I learn to believe in God the Father, 
who hath made me and all the world; and in 
God the Son, who hath redeemed me and all 
mankind; and in God the Holy Ghost, who sanc- 
tifieth me and all the elect people of God " ; or 
when in answer to the question, " What are the 
decrees of God? " he is instructed to reply, 
" The decrees of God are His eternal purpose 
according to the counsel of His will, whereby, 
for His own glory, He hath foreordained what- 
soever cometh to pass," the child is unquestion- 
ably announcing some of the sublimest concep- 
tions of the universe which have ever dawned 
8 



Religious Education of an American Child 

upon the mind of man ; yet it is obvious that they 
must be for the present remote and unassimi- 
lated conceptions. What may be tremendously 
real to the trained theologian becomes sheer 
sonorous phrases to the unsophisticated child. 
The best that can be thus achieved is the con- 
sent of ignorance and the mimicry of maturity. 
The child's nature is poetic, dramatic, imagina- 
tive; and it is as little at home in the rigidity 
of dogma or the regulations of ecclesiasticism as 
is a thrush in a cage. 

Where, then, must religious education begin? 
It must begin where the child's nature happens 
to be. The psychology of childhood is the key 
to instruction. Association with the highest, in- 
timacy with excellence, a habit of mind induced 
by companionship with the Good, the Beauti- 
ful, and the True, — these well-proved processes 
of psychological operation wake and kindle the 
susceptible nature of the child to warmth and 
utterance. In other words, religious education 
should begin with religion itself rather than 
with the interpretation and explanation of re- 
ligion. A hymn may speak to the child's na- 
ture while a catechism is dumb. The Twenty- 
third Psalm and the story of the Prodigal Son 
may create real pictures in his mind, while the 
creeds and the sacraments are still seen through 

9 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

a glass darkly. The same Jesus to whom little 
children nestled and who took them in his arms, 
still says to parents and teachers, " Suffer the 
little children to come unto me," even while 
the mysterious problems of his nature and office 
may be unexplored and even unimagined by the 
child. Let the child, therefore, learn, not by 
rote only but by heart, the purest lyrical utter- 
ances of the religious life. Let him be at home 
among the great sayings and doings of Jesus, 
as one whose own home is hung round with pic- 
tures of those scenes which, even before he can 
interpret them, arrest his reverent gaze; and 
this association with the best may remain for 
him a more permanent guide and restraint than 
the most irrefutable arguments of dogma or 
the most unquestioning acceptance of conform- 
ity. Out of the heart, it is written, come the 
issues of life; and many a life has been sustained 
in the emergencies and crises of the world, not 
so much by the creed which it has accepted, as 
by the survival of emotions and instincts, and 
even of phrases or verses, which re-awaken the 
associations and faith of a little child. 

Religious education, however, though it 

should begin with the religious nature of the 

child, must proceed to the interpretation and 

justification of that primary experience. The 

10 



Religious Education of an American Child 



first conditions of growth for a flower are those 
of soil and sunshine; but the time arrives when 
the shoot which emerges from the ground must 
adapt itself to the world in which it is to live. 
It is the same with the soul of the child. Prob- 
lems of thought and of duty soon confront this 
emerging experience; and it must be trained to 
a fruitful growth and rendered fit to survive. 
What, then, are the further principles which 
should direct religious education as it thus 
watches and tends this expanding life? 

The first principle is Reality. This does not 
mearTthat there should be nothing left for later 
experiences to explore or for richer insight to 
interpret; but that the evidence offered and the 
conviction encouraged should be, so far as they 
go, genuine, reasonable, and unconstrained. 
To overload the young mind with a cargo of 
doctrine is to lose religious buoyancy and to be 
at the mercy of spiritual storms. A wise edu- 
cation begins with the near, the obvious^ancTthe 
verifiable. It subordinates completeness to 
reality. It does not urge on the child what is 
unreal to the teacher. Its attitude to the child 
is that of undisguised sincerity. It is concerned 
not so much with conformity as with consistency. 
One truth realized is more convincing than a 
whole system of theology unassimilated. One 

II 






Religious Education of an American Citizen 

aspect of nature, one glimpse of God, one teach- 
ing of Christ, one lesson of experience, if it be 
real, is enough to steady the will as it makes its 
way to firmer loyalty. Religious education, in 
other words, is qualitative rather than quanti- 
tative. When a man in the oil-regions sinks a 
shaft, it is enough if at any one point he strikes 
a supply. One flowing well is a fortune. Out 
of its depths gushes so ample a yield that his 
further problem is not to sink more wells, but to 
find storage for his blazing wealth. It is the 
same when one strikes truth. One well of 
truth makes a mind rich. Out of its depth flow 
the interpretations and consolations of experi- 
ence, and a judicious education sets itself to store 
this wealth just as it comes, and to generate 
from it the light and warmth which it is able 
to supply. 

The second principle of this riper education 
is Personality. Among the many blunders of 
a systematized and authoritative education in 
religion is its uniformity, its pre-established 
method, its lack of flexibility, its impersonal 
character. Religious experience is given a pre- 
scribed form; conversion assumes a uniform 
type; a twice-born nature is regarded as more 
devout than a once-born soul; education, in the 
church as in the school, standardizes mediocrity 
12 



Religious Education of an American Child 

instead of exalting initiative. Over against all 
this mechanism of education stands the princi- 
ple of personality. To take a life as it is and 
make of it what it was meant to be — to discern 
the potential qualities of different lives, their 
animal spirits, their temperamental tendencies, 
their points of reaction and responsibility, and 
to draw out the latent possibilities of consecra- 
tion or endeavour — that is the infinitely varied 
and perplexing, yet fascinating, task which par- 
ents, pastors, and teachers have to meet. Each 
personality offers a new problem. Each char- 
acter, however imperfect or headstrong it may 
be, has its own way of approach to God. One 
life must be converted, or turned round, by an 
abrupt revolution in its controlling aim. An- 
other may be led straight along the way it was 
unconsciously going. There is no more a fixed 
scale of merit for the growth of character than 
for the diversity of blossoms into which a gar- 
den blooms. Some lives, like that of Paul, 
must be twice-born; some souls, like that of 
Jesus, exhibit a continuous, unrevolutionized, 
and once-born experience. Some must be struck 
down by the sudden illumination of a flash from 
heaven, and others may " increase in wisdom 
and stature and in favor with God and men." 
To take a person and make of him a personal- 

13 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

ity, — that is the aim of religious, as of all, edu- 
cation. 

It is no small encouragement to observe that 
this respect for personality marked the habitual 
teaching of Jesus Christ. His immediate fol- 
lowers were of very varied and not altogether 
perfect types; but Jesus took them just as they 
were, and by his faith in each drew out from 
each the personality which was latent within. 
The. affectionate John and the sceptical Thomas 
were not made alike, but both were made what 
neither had imagined that he could be. Even 
the fickle-minded and wavering Peter, whose 
character was more like shifting sand than solid 
rock, found himself trusted and leaned on as 
one whose name fitted his nature, until under the 
pedagogical guidance of his great Teacher the 
sand of character actually hardened into sand- 
stone, and Peter became the rock which Jesus 
said he could be. It is the same with Christian 
education still. It sets the personality of youth 
face to face with the personality of Jesus Christ 
and trusts the operation of spiritual law to con- 
vert softness into strength, cowardice into cour- 
age, and sand into rock. 

- Finally, there remains the principle which 
gives to religious education its special adapta- 
tion to American life, and applies it to the spe- 
14 



Religious Education of an American Child 

cific case of the American child. It is the prin- 
ciple of Democracy. Whatever may be said of 
the method of authority in religion or in poli- 
tics, and however difficult it may be under a 
feudal or aristocratic or military system to re- 
gard religion as free, personal, and spiritual, a 
country where liberty and equality are the very 
air one breathes cannot be a favorable soil for 
an exotic, imported, or dictatorial faith. The 
American child, whom we began by describing, 
is constitutionally free in his habit of mind, in- 
tolerant of dictation, inquisitive of reasons and 
causes, looking forward rather than back. 
Aristocracy in religion, as in social life, may be 
attractive to the few who have become, through 
travel or training, practically Europeanized in 
taste; but for the many millions who have been 
bred in the democracy of American institutions, 
or who have fled from the feudalism of other 
lands, nothing less than a fraternal, simple, un- 
pretentious, rational, and democratic religion 
can offer any commanding appeal. Hierarch- 
ies, absolutism, State churches with their dig- 
nitaries and diplomacy, are as foreign to the 
American mind as are autocratic and military 
systems of government. If religion is to com- 
mand the loyalty of young people to whom free 
inquiry, the right of private judgment, and the 

15 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

consent of the governed, make the foundations 
of political life, teachers of religion, however 
dearly they may prize the organizations to 
which they belong, must subordinate conform- 
ity to conscience, dictation to inspiration, the 
Church to the soul, and must promote a reli- 
gious experience which is consistent with every 
rational desire of a spiritual democracy. 

Under these principles of Reality, Personal- 
ity, and Democracy, the religious education of 
an American child becomes a natural process, 
which it is a privilege to direct and a joy to re- 
call. It begins with the near, the practical and 
the real; it proceeds through diversities of ad- 
ministration in the one spirit; and it ends in a 
religion which is in harmony with citizenship, 
with science, and with the experience of life. It 
begins with the self-discipline of the parents; it 
proceeds through the discovery of God's inten- 
tion for the child; and it is confirmed by the 
reverence for personality and the confidence in 
spiritual democracy which mark the teaching of 
Jesus Christ. The sower of such an education 
may go forth to sow with the confident step of 
one who is a laborer together with God; and 
though some of his seed may fall on stony 
places where there is not much depth of earth, 
16 



Religious Education of an American Child 

the field where he lavishly scatters may surprise 
him with its fertility, and the sun and soil may 
conspire with his service to bring forth thirty- 
or sixty- or a hundred-fold. 



17 



II 

THE AMERICAN BOY AND HIS HOME 

The first thing to say about the problem of the 
American Boy is that it is a part of the problem 
of the American Home. Behind all the sug- 
gestions which are now so freely made concern- 
ing the training, duties, opportunities, and temp- 
tations of boys, there stands always in the 
background the larger question of domestic 
integrity, unity, and permanence. The problem 
of the family is the crux of modern civilization. 
When one examines, for instance, the pro- 
gramme of industrial revolution, with its eco- 
nomic propositions concerning the control of 
property, he may be startled to find that this 
revolution in property-holding involves a not 
less revolutionary change in the domestic rela- 
tions, and that the storm-centre of this economic 
transition is likely to be found in the apparently 
remote and unrelated problem of the family. 
Or again, if one undertakes some work of char- 
ity — the relief of destitution, it may be, or 
the building of improved dwellings — he finds 
his special form of service inevitably correlated 
18 



The American Boy and His Home 

with the problem of the home. How to hold 
the family together when the bread-winner dies 
or deserts; how to insure reasonable privacy for 
the family under the conditions of tenement- 
life — these are questions which confront mod- 
ern philanthropy and social legislation every 
day. The family is not only, as has been often 
said, the unit of civilization; it is also the test of 
civilization. The stability and persistence of 
any nation or race is in proportion to the integ- 
rity and coherence of its family group. 

Here, then, is the fundamental fact about a 
boy. A good boy is the natural product of a 
good home; and all the efforts of philanthropy 
to make boys better by wholesale schemes of 
education or recreation are but imperfect sub- 
stitutes for the work and play which are the 
spontaneous products of a healthy-minded 
home. The professional " worker " among 
boys is like a physician called to visit a child, 
who administers to his little patient tonics, 
drugs, and exercises, while all the time aware 
that these prescriptions, however serviceable 
they may be, are but substitutes for the fresh 
air, good food, and simple living which the 
child should have had in its home to fortify its 
life against weakness and disease. 

At this point, then, we come upon the great 

19 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

and overshadowing peril of a boy's life. It is 
not, as many suppose, his bad companions or 
his bad books or his bad habits; it is the peril 
of homelessness. Homelessness is not merely 
house-lessness, — the having no bed or room 
which can be called one's own. It is the isola- 
tion of the boy's soul; the lack of some one to 
listen to him; a life without roots which hold 
him in his place and make him grow. This is 
what drives the boy into the arms of evil, and 
makes the street his home and the gang his fam- 
ily; or else drives him in upon himself with un- 
communicated imaginings and feverish desires. 
Such a boyhood verifies that experience of which 
Jesus spoke, where a life was like an empty 
house, and precisely because it was empty there 
entered seven devils where one had dwelt be- 
fore, and the last state of that man was worse 
than the first. If there is one thing with which 
a boy cannot be trusted alone, it is himself. He 
is by nature a gregarious animal; and if the 
group which nature provides for him is denied, 
then he gives himself to any group which may 
solicit. A boy, like all things in nature, abhors 
a vacuum; and if his home be a vacuum of love- 
lessness, then he abhors his home. 

This risk of homelessness is, however, not 
run by poor boys only. There is, of course, a 
20 



The American Boy and His Home 

type of poverty which necessarily involves home- 
lessness, — the life of the street-Arab or the 
tramp. Yet, in the vast majority of humble 
homes one of the most conspicuous and beauti- 
ful traits to be observed is the strength of fam- 
ily affection, resisting every kind of strain, — the 
wife clinging to her drunken husband, or the 
parents protecting their wayward son even 
against the advice of a judge upon the bench. 
On the other hand, an increasing risk which 
many prosperous families encounter is the ten- 
dency to homelessness, the temptations of the 
nomadic life, as though a home were a tent 
which one might fold " like the Arabs, and as 
silently steal away "; the slackening of domestic 
responsibility through the habit of transient res- 
idence in boarding-houses or hotels as refuges 
from the cares of a home. 

The fact is that between some boys of the 
most prosperous and some of the least pros- 
perous type there exists a curious and often 
unrecognized likeness of condition. Both may 
run grave risk of homelessness; and what 
should be domestic life to them may become a 
shifting and temporary incident. Rich par- 
ents may be so completely preoccupied with 
money-making or money-spending, that their 
home becomes little more than a sleeping-place ; 

21 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

and poor parents may, though with better 
reason, be separated from their children from 
early morning till late evening by the neces- 
sities of bread-winning at the factory or 
shop. In either case of homelessness, there- 
fore, there is the same necessity for finding some 
substitute for a home. For the homeless chil- 
dren of the poor, philanthropy has devised a 
Placing-out System, which deports boys from 
the homelessness of a city to domestic life in 
rural communities. For the homeless children 
of the rich a similar Placing-out System has 
been provided by the establishment of boarding- 
schools, where devoted and intelligent teachers 
accept the parental responsibilities which over- 
burdened or self-indulgent parents decline. 

There are, it must be recognized, many cir- 
cumstances of duty or occupation in the complex- 
ity and migratoriness of modern life which make 
it necessary for parents to live where it is not ex- 
pedient for boys to be, and which therefore may 
compel this delegation of parental privilege. 
Yet, admitting these important exceptions, it is 
evident that the general consent of prosperous 
parents to commit to school-masters the training 
of boys in the most critical and formative years 
of life indicates in many homes either a dis- 
trust of parental capacity to rear children, 

22 



The American Boy and His Home 

or a subordination of the care of children to 
other interests of social life. Much may be 
gained by this system of delegated parenthood. 
A boy is likely to acquire in his boarding-school 
a sound body, a passion for athletics, a fine sense 
of manly honor, congenial companionships, and 
even, under skilful teachers, some taste for 
study; but it is not improbable that he may miss 
something of the considerateness and self-sacri- 
fice which are the natural products of the in- 
timacy, discipline, and even friction of a judic- 
ious and affectionate home. 

If, therefore, a boy is normally the product 
of a home, what kind of American home is 
likely to make the right kind of American 
boy? There are, it would seem, three char- 
acteristics which a boy must recognize before 
he will think of his home as good, and which, 
if he does recognize them as marks of his own 
home, will make him remember that home as 
the most precious of his moral inheritances. 
The first of these characteristics is Simplicity. 
Simplicity, however, does not mean meagreness, 
or emptiness, or lack of comfort, or even the ab- 
sence of luxuries. Some good homes are luxur- 
ious, and some are bare; and bad homes may be 
found among both poor and rich. Simplicity 
is the opposite of complexity; and the home 

23 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

which is blessed with simplicity is an uncom- 
plicated and single-minded home, free from di- 
visive interests and conflicting desires, finding its 
happiness in common sympathies and joys. A 
simple home, that is to say, is simply a home; 
not a step to something else, not an instrument 
of social ambition, not a mere sleeping-place, 
like a kennel into which a dog creeps for the 
night; but a centre of affectionate self-denial and 
mutual forbearance; an end in itself, as though 
the main concern for a family were simply to 
make a home and to keep it simple. When a 
boy discovers that his parents find their satis- 
faction elsewhere than in the home, — in the 
club of the prosperous or in the saloon of the 
poor — then the boy also will follow the group- 
instinct as it leads him to the street or the gang; 
in so far as he sees the home satisfying his 
parents, it is likely to satisfy him. 

The second mark of a good home is Consist- 
ency. The parental discipline of the home is 
to be chiefly maintained, not by precepts, but by 
the consistent conduct of the parents themselves. 
A boy is not easily moved by exhortation, but 
he is affected with extraordinary ease by con- 
tagion. A boy is in many points immature and 
unobservant, but one trait in him is highly de- 
veloped, — the capacity to detect anything that 
24 



The American Boy and His Home 

looks like humbug. If he observe any consider- 
able inconsistency between precept and example, 
between exhortation and character, all the well- 
intended efforts of his home are likely to be in 
vain. Nothing is more contagious than a con- 
sistent life. We hear much of the self-propa- 
gating nature of disease and sin, but these ills 
which are contrary to nature are by no means 
so easily transmitted as is the contagion of 
goodness. No greater mistake can be made by 
parents than to fancy that a boy is naturally in- 
clined to go wrong ; and no mistake is so likely to 
make a boy go where he is expected to go. The 
fact is that anything is natural to a boy. He 
can be bent crooked or kept straight like a grow- 
ing bough; and the chief reason why goodness 
does not appear to him more tempting than 
sin is that goodness is seldom made so interest- 
ing, picturesque, or heroic as sin. In the Orien- 
tal picture of the shepherd and the sheep in 
the Fourth Gospel, the shepherd goes before 
and the sheep hear his voice and follow 
him. That is the only way to be a shepherd of 
boys. They are hard cattle to drive, but easy 
to lead. There is nothing they like better than 
a consistent, single-minded, straight-going 
leader, and when they hear his voice they fol- 
low him. 

25 



Religious Education of ax American Citizen 

Out of the simplicity and consistency of a 
good home issues its third characteristic. It is 
that relation between children and their parents 
whose historical name is Piety. The word has 
not only become involved in religious implica- 
tions, but also carries with it a suggestion of 
unreality, formalism, ostentation, or pretence. 
A pious person is apt to seem to a healthy- 
minded boy an artificial or sentimental creature. 
Yet Piety, in its Latin usage, was the name for 
the duty and loyalty of a child to its parents, or 
of a wife to her husband. iEneas, in Virgil, 
was called pious because he was a good son of 
Anchises. Piety toward God is, therefore, 
nothing else than the affection of a son trans- 
lated into a religious experience. Man, as 
Jesus taught, is a child of God, and turns to 
God just as a human child turns to his father 
with loyalty and love. When the Prodigal Son 
comes to himself, he says, " I will arise and go 
to my Father." Religion, that is to say, re- 
gards the universe as a home; and duty con- 
ceived as loyalty to God becomes Piety. 

This, then, is the American home which 
makes the right kind of American boy, — a 
home where simplicity and consistency open into 
piety; where a boy thinks of his father not as a 
drill-master or fault-finder, so that the first in- 
26 



The American Boy and His Home 

stinct of the boy is to keep out of the way; or of 
his mother as yielding a fragment of her day 
to her children, while committing their nurture 
for the most part to hired experts; but of both 
parents as comrades to whom it is a happi- 
ness to go, and as advisers from whom it is 
safe to learn. As the course of experience 
broadens with the years, and the problems and 
temptations of maturity confront the man who 
was once a boy, he looks back on these par- 
ents and this home with a piety which needs 
little expansion to become a part of his religion, 
and finds in that retreating reminiscence of his 
boyhood the most convincing picture which he 
can frame of the discipline and watchfulness of 
God. In a most profound and searching sense 
the prayer of Wordsworth is answered in the 
experiences of his life: 

" The child is father of the man, 
And I could wish my days to be 
Bound each to each by natural piety." 

Under what conditions is this relationship of 
domestic piety most naturally attained? Is it 
one of the perquisites of prosperity, so that 
those to whom much has been given have added 
to them this further blessing? Or is it, on the 
other hand, a region of the Kingdom of Heaven 

27 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

which they who have riches may hardly enter? 
Fortunately for American life no such fixed 
relation exists between condition and character. 
Prosperity may be as free from complexity, in- 
consistency, and impiety as is poverty; and pov- 
erty may by its overwhelming weight repress af- 
fection and joy. Yet, on the whole, the special 
privilege of domestic intimacy, with its parental 
satisfactions and its filial piety, is more acces- 
sible in modest and unambitious homes than 
among the complex and divisive interests of lux- 
urious conditions. This is one of the facts of 
civilization which go far to atone for inequal- 
ity of economic opportunity. Wealth may 
bring to a home many advantages, but the prob- 
lem of the American boy is certainly harder to 
meet where sacrifices are not demanded and self- 
indulgence is not prohibited. The home which 
is most likely to produce the best kind of boy — 
and the type of home from which, in fact, the 
vast majority of effective American citizens have 
sprung — is where plain conditions, hard work, 
and mutual sacrifices have stiffened the will, 
softened the affections, and prompted that sim- 
plicity, consistency, and piety which are as pre- 
cious possessions to a man as to a boy. 

At this point, then, the problem of the Ameri- 
can boy becomes merged in the larger problem 
28 



The American Boy and His Home 

of the American character. What the boy is 
to become is in the main determined by the pre- 
vailing habits, customs, and standards of Ameri- 
can life. Miss Jane Addams, with her habitual 
insight, once said of social service: " We can- 
not do much for the poor; we can only do things 
with the poor." The saying is not less true of 
boys. We cannot do much for boys; we can 
only do things with them. The first problem set 
before a parent is not to make his boy good, but 
to make himself what he wants his boy to be- 
come. The first condition of doing good is be- 
ing good. Filial piety is the corollary of par- 
ental wisdom. The dominant note of the Amer- 
ican character is repeated in shriller tones by the 
American boy. 

And how is this preliminary obligation of 
parental fitness to be met? It is most nat- 
urally met by accepting to its full the reaction 
of the boy on the life that wants to help the 
boy. The boy has as much to teach as he has 
to learn. Each demand laid on the parent to 
advise or correct the boy is at the same time a 
demand laid on the parent to test his own char- 
acter. To desire that one's boy shall be un- 
stained and healthy-minded is to be pledged to 
the same law of life. However much one may 
fail in parental wisdom, it is far worse to prac- 

29 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

tise parental hypocrisy. He must, therefore, 
so far as grace is given him, be what he prays 
that his son may be. His boy is a mirror in 
which he sees himself. The most poignant sor- 
row which he can imagine or endure would not 
be the perdition of his own soul, but the in- 
heritance or contagion of his own sin reproduced 
in his own son; and the most justifiable and 
permanent happiness which can be his, in this 
world or another, would be derived from the 
assurance that his boy may legitimately trace 
his health of body and his strength of will to 
the influences of his boyhood's home. 



30 



Ill 

THE RELIGION OF A COLLEGE STUDENT 

The American youth, whose spiritual evolution 
we are tracing, passes from the period of child- 
hood and the environment of home into the 
more complex and confusing conditions of his 
maturer life. He may proceed either to the 
privilege of further education at a College or 
University, or more directly to the responsi- 
bilities and circumstances of business life. In 
each of these riper experiences he is met again 
by the problem of spiritual discipline; and each 
of these social types has its part in the religious 
education of American citizens. 

Let us follow, first, the boy as he goes to col- 
lege, and consider how far he may reasonably 
expect that his religious life may there be stead- 
ied and enriched. Many appeals have been 
made to the college student concerning his duty 
to religion. He should be, it is urged, a more 
constant attendant at worship; he should com- 
mit himself more openly to religious loyalty; he 
should guard himself against the infidelity and 

3i 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

indecision which attack him with subtle strat- 
egy under the conditions of college life. May 
it not be of advantage, however, to consider 
this relationship from the opposite point of 
view and to inquire what religion on its side 
must offer in order to meet the needs of an edu- 
cated young man? What has a young man the 
right to ask as a condition of his loyalty? 
What is there which the Christian Church must 
learn concerning the character and ideals of a 
normal, educated, modern youth before it can 
hope to lead the heart of such a youth to an un- 
constrained obedience? What is the religion 
of a college student? 

There are, of course, certain limitations in 
such an inquiry. We must assume on both 
sides open-mindedness, teachableness, serious- 
ness, and good faith. We cannot take into ac- 
count either a foolish student or a foolish 
church. There are, on the one hand, some 
youths of the college-age whom no conceivable 
adaptation of religious teaching can hope to 
reach. They are self-absorbed, self-conscious, 
self-satisfied, self-conceited. There is little 
that the Church can do for them but to pray 
that, as they grow older, they may grow more 
humble, and, therefore, more teachable. On 
the other hand, there are some methods of re- 
32 



The Religion of a College Student 

ligious activity which cannot reasonably antici- 
pate the co-operation of educated men. Here 
and there an imaginative young person may be 
won by emotional appeals or ecclesiastical pic- 
turesqueness; but the normal type of thoughtful 
youth demands of religious teaching soberness, 
intellectual satisfaction, and reasonable claims. 
We must dismiss from consideration both 
the unreasoning youth and the unreasonable 
Church. We set before ourselves, on the one 
hand, an alert, open-minded, well-trained youth, 
looking out with eager eyes into the mystery of 
the universe ; and, on the other hand, a thought- 
ful, candid, sensible Church, resting its claim 
not on tradition or passion, but on its perception 
and maintenance of verifiable truth. How 
shall these two factors of modern life — the 
chief factors of its future stability — the life of 
thoughtful youth and the truth of the Christian 
religion, come to know and help each other; 
and what are the traits of Christian teaching 
which must be unmistakably recognized before 
it can commend itself to a young student in a 
modern world? 

To these questions it must be answered, first 
of all, that the religion of a college student 
must satisfy that passion which, as has been in- 
dicated, is felt even in childhood, but which 

33 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

becomes more confirmed in youth, for Reality. 
No effort of the Church is more misdirected 
than the attempt to win the loyalty of intelli- 
gent young people by multiplying the accessories 
or incidentals of the religious life — its ecclesi- 
astical embellishments or its provision for so- 
ciability. The modern college student, while in 
many respects very immature, is extraordinarily 
alert in his discernment of anything which seems 
to him of the nature of strategy or diplomacy. 
The first demand he makes either of compan- 
ions or teachers is the demand for sincerity, 
straightforwardness, reality. He is not likely 
to be won to the Christian life by external per- 
suasions laboriously planned " to draw in young 
people," or to assure them that religion is a 
companionable and pleasant thing. These in- 
cidental activities of the Church have their un- 
questioned place as expressions of Christian 
sentiment and service, but they are misapplied 
when utilized as decoys. They are corollaries 
of religious experience, not preliminaries of it; 
they are what one wants to do when he is a 
Christian; not what makes a thoughtful man 
believe in Christ. The modern young man sees 
these things just as they are. Indeed, he is 
inclined to be on his guard against them. He 
will nibble at the bait, but he will not take the 
34 



The Religion of a College Student 

hook. He will consume the refreshments of 
the Church, serve on its committees, enjoy its 
aesthetic effects, while still withholding himself 
from the personal consecration which these 
were designed to induce. He will accept no 
substitute for reality. He wants the best. He 
is not old enough to be diffident or circuitous in 
his desires ; he does not linger in the outer courts 
of truth; he marches straight into the Holy of 
Holies, and lifts the veil from the central mys- 
tery. The Church may fail of its mission to 
the student because it imagines him to be frivo- 
lous and indifferent, when in fact he is tremen- 
dously in earnest and passionately sincere. 

And suppose, on the other hand, that the 
Church meets this candid creature just where he 
is, and, instead of offering him accessories and 
incidentals as adapted to his frivolous mind, 
presents to him, with unadorned and sober rea- 
sonableness, the realities of religion, what dis- 
covery is the Church then likely to make? It 
may discover, to its own surprise, and often 
to the surprise of the youth himself, an unantici- 
pated susceptibility in him to religious reality, 
and a singular freshness and vitality of religious 
experience. Many people imagine that the 
years from seventeen to twenty-two are not 
likely to be years of natural piety. The world, 

35 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

it is urged, is just making its appeal to the flesh 
and to the mind with overmastering power, 
while the experience of life has not yet created 
for itself a stable religion. Thirty years ago 
it was determined in Harvard University that 
religion should be no longer regarded as a part 
of academic discipline but should be offered to 
youth as a privilege and opportunity. It was 
at that time argued by at least one learned per- 
son that the system was sure to fail, because, 
by the very conditions of their age, young men 
were unsusceptible to religion. They had out- 
grown, he urged, the religion of their childhood, 
and had not yet grown into the religion of their 
maturity; so that a plan which rested on faith 
in the inherent religiousness of young men was 
doomed to disappointment. If, however, the 
voluntary system of religion applied to univer- 
sity life has proved anything in these thirty 
years, it has proved the essentially religious na- 
ture of the normal, educated young American. 
To offer religion, not as an obligation of college 
life, but as its supreme privilege, was an act of 
faith in young men. It assumed that when re- 
ligion was honestly and intelligently presented 
to the mind of youth it would receive a reverent 
and responsive recognition. 

The happy issue of this bold undertaking 

36 



The Religion of a College Student 

has serious lessons for religious teachers. It 
disposes altogether of the meagre expecta- 
tion with which the life of youth is frequently 
regarded. A preacher, addressing a col- 
lege audience, once announced that just as 
childhood was assailed by so many infantile 
diseases that it was surprising to see any child 
grow up, so youth was assailed by so many 
sins that it was surprising to see any young man 
grow up unstained. There is no rational basis 
for this enervating scepticism. The fact is that 
it is natural for a young man to be good, just as 
it is natural for a child to grow up. A much 
wiser word was spoken by a beloved scholar, 
who, being invited to address an audience on 
the temptations of college life, said that he 
should consider chiefly its temptations to excel- 
lence. A college boy, that is to say, is not, as 
many suppose, a peculiarly misguided and es- 
sentially light-minded person. He is, on the 
contrary, set in conditions which tempt to excel- 
lence, and is peculiarly responsive to every sin- 
cere appeal to his higher life. Behind the mask 
of light-mindedness or self-assertion which he 
assumes, his interior life is wrestling with funda- 
mental problems, as Jacob w T restled with the 
angel and would not let it go until it blessed 
him. " Your young men," said the prophet, 

37 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

with deep insight into the nature of youth, 
" shall see visions." They are our natural 
idealists. The shades of the prison-house of 
common life have not yet closed about their 
sense of the romantic, the heroic and the real. 
To this susceptibility of youth religious teach- 
ing should be addressed. It should believe in 
a young man even when he does not believe in 
himself. It should attempt no adaptation of 
truth to immaturity or indifference. It should 
assume that a young man, even though he dis- 
guise the fact by every subterfuge of modesty 
or mock defiance, is capable of spiritual vision, 
and that his secret desire is to have that vision 
interpreted and prolonged. When Jesus met 
the young men whom he wanted for his dis- 
ciples, his first relation with them was one of 
absolute, and apparently unjustified, confidence. 
He believed in them and in their spiritual 
responsiveness. He disclosed to them the 
secrets of their own hearts. He dismissed 
accessories and revealed realities. He did 
not cheapen religion or make small demands. 
He bade these men leave all and follow him. 
He took for granted that their nature called 
for the religion he had to offer, and he gave it 
to them without qualification or fear. The 
young men, for whom the accidental aspects of 

38 



The Religion of a College Student 

religion were thus stripped away and its heart 
laid bare, leaped to meet this revelation of re- 
ality. " We have found the Messiah," they 
told each other. They had been believed in 
even before they believed in themselves, and that 
which the new sense of reality disclosed to them 
as real they at last in reality became. 

Such is the first aspect of the religion of the 
student — its demand for reality. To reach 
the heart of an educated young man the mes- 
sage of religion must be unequivocal, uncompli- 
cated, genuine, masculine, direct, real. This, 
however, is but part of a second quality in 
the religion of educated youth. The teaching 
of religion to which such a mind will listen 
must be, still further, consistent with truth as 
discerned elsewhere. It must involve no par- 
tition of life between thinking and believing. 
It must be, that is to say, a rational religion. 
The religion of a college student is one expres- 
sion of his rational life. To say this is not 
to say that religion must be stripped of mystery 
or reduced to the level of a natural science in 
order to commend itself to educated youth. On 
the contrary, the tendencies of the higher edu- 
cation lead in precisely the opposite direction. 
They lead to the conviction that all truth, 
whether approached by the way of science, phi- 

39 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

losophy, art, or religion, opens before a serious 
student into a world of mystery, a sense of the 
Infinite, a spacious region of idealism, where 
one enters with reverence and awe. Instead 
of demanding that religion shall be reduced to 
the level of other knowledge, it will appear to 
such a student more reasonable to demand that 
all forms of knowledge shall be lifted into the 
realm of faith. It is, however, quite another 
matter to discover in the teaching of religion 
any fundamental inconsistency with the spirit 
of research and the method of proof which the 
student elsewhere candidly accepts; and we may 
be sure that it is this sense of inconsistency 
which is the chief source of any reaction from 
religious influence which may now be observed 
among educated young men. 

Under the voluntary system of religion at 
Harvard University there is established a meet- 
ing-place, known as the Preacher's Room, 
where the minister conducting morning prayers 
spends some hours each day in free and un- 
constrained intimacy with such students as 
may seek him. This room has witnessed many 
frank confessions of religious difficulty and 
denial, and as each member of the Staff of 
Preachers recalls his experiences at the uni- 
versity he testifies that the most fruitful hours 
40 



The Religion of a College Student 

of his service have been those of confidential 
conference in the privacy of the Preacher's 
Room. But if such a counsellor were further 
called to describe those instances of spiritual 
bewilderment and helplessness which have 
seemed to him most pathetic or tragic, he 
would not hesitate to recall the by no means in- 
frequent cases of young men who had been 
trained in a conception of religion which had 
become untenable under the conditions of uni- 
versity life. A restricted denominationalism, a 
backward-looking ecclesiasticism, an ignorant 
defiance of Biblical criticism, and, no less em- 
phatically, an intolerant and supercilious liber- 
alism — these habits of mind become simply 
impossible when a young man finds himself 
thrown into a world of wide learning, religious 
liberty, and intellectual hospitality. Then en- 
sues, for many a young mind, a bitter experience 
of spiritual disillusion and reconstruction. The 
young man wanders through dry places, seek- 
ing rest and finding none; and he cannot even 
say: U I will return into my house from 
whence I came out." To go back is impossible, 
and before him the way is hid. Meantime his 
loving parents and his anxious pastor observe 
with trembling his defection from the old ways, 
deplore the influence of the university upon re- 

4i 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

ligious faith, and pray for a restoration of 
belief which is as contrary to nature as the 
restoration of an oak to the acorn from which 
it grew. 

Now, in all this touching experience, where is 
the gravest blame to be laid? It must, no 
doubt, be confessed that among the conditions of 
college life there are some which tend to en- 
courage in a young man a certain pertness and 
priggishness of mind which make the old ways 
of faith seem old-fashioned and primitive. In- 
deed, it seems to some young men that any way 
of faith is superfluous to a thorough man of the 
world, such as the average sophomore ought 
to be. But these cheerful young persons, for 
whom the past has no lessons, and in whom the 
new ideal of self-culture has for the moment sup- 
pressed the earlier ideals of self-sacrifice or serv- 
ice, are not a type of student life which need 
be taken seriously. They are the lookers-on of 
the academic world. The strenuous game of 
real learning goes on; and these patrons of the 
strife sit, as it were, along the side-lines and 
wear the college colors, but do not participate 
in the training or the victory. Let us turn to 
that much more significant body of youth who 
are in deadly earnest with their thought, and 
who find it essential to intellectual peace to at- 
42 



The Religion of a College Student 

tain some sense of unity in their conception of 
the world. For this type of college youth — 
the most conscientious, most thoughtful, most 
precious — the blame for inconsistency be- 
tween the new learning and the inherited faith 
lies, for the most part, not with the college, but 
with the Church. There was once a time when 
these young minds could be in some degree se- 
cluded by solicitous parents and anxious pastors 
from the signs of change in modern thought. 
They could be prohibited from approaching 
great tracts of literature ; they could be hidden 
in the cloistered life of a strictly guarded col- 
lege; their learning could be ensured to be in 
safe conformity with a predetermined creed. 
There is now no corner of the intellectual world 
where this seclusion is possible. Out of the 
most unexpected sources — a novel, a poem, a 
newspaper — issues the contagion of modern 
thought; and, in an instant, the life that has 
been shut in and has seemed secure is hopelessly 
affected. 

And how does the young man, touched with 
the modern spirit, come to regard the faith 
which he is thus forced to reject? Sometimes 
he recalls it with a sense of pathos, as an early 
love soon lost; sometimes with a deep indigna- 
tion, as the source of scepticism and denial. 

43 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

For one educated youth who is alienated from 
religion by the persuasions of science, philoso- 
phy, or art, ten, we may be sure, are estranged 
by an irrational or impracticable teaching of 
religion. It is not an inherent issue between 
learning and faith which forces them out of the 
Church in which they were born; it is an un- 
scientific and reactionary theory of faith. It is 
not the college which must renew its conformity 
to the Church; it is the Church which must open 
its eyes to the marvellous expansion of intellec- 
tual horizon which lies before the mind of every 
college student to-day. 

There is another aspect of the same experi- 
ence. This process of intellectual growth is 
often accompanied, not by a reaction from re- 
ligion, but by a new appreciation of its reason- 
ableness. In a degree which few who repre- 
sent religion have as yet realized, the extension 
of the area of truth may be at the same time an 
expansion of spiritual vision and a revival of 
religious confidence. Within many a college, 
often without the knowledge of its religious 
teachers, the experience of intellectual liberty 
itself is renewing a rational faith. Many a 
student comes to college in a mood of complete 
antagonism to his earlier faith, but when that 
same youth four years later graduates from col- 
44 



The Religion of a College Student 

lege, he may give himself with a passionate con- 
secration to the calling of the Christian ministry 
which he had so lately thought superfluous and 
outgrown. It is the natural consequence of 
discovering that the religious life is not in con- 
flict with the aims of a university, but is pre- 
cisely that ideal of conduct and service toward 
which the spirit of a university logically leads. 
" I beseech you therefore, brethren," said the 
Apostle who knew most about the relation of 
scholarship to faith, " that ye present your 
bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto 
God, which is your reasonable service." That 
is a summons which the Christian Church still 
needs to hear. Two equal perils confront re- 
ligion, — a service which is unreasonable, and 
a reason which is unserviceable; activity with- 
out thoughtfulness, and theology without vital- 
ity; sentiment without science, and truth with- 
out love. The religion of a college student 
must be a reasonable service, consistent with 
reverent truth-seeking, open to the light, hos- 
pitable to progress, rational, teachable, free. 
The Church which sets itself against the cur- 
rents of rational thought, and has for great 
words like Evolution, Higher Criticism, Moral- 
ity, Beauty, Law, only an undiscerning sneer, is 
in reality not a defender of the faith, but a posi- 

45 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

tive ally of the infidelity of the present age. 
The Church which asks no loyalty that is not 
rational, no service of the will that is not an 
offering of the mind, comes with its refreshing 
message to many a bewildered young life and is 
met by dedication to a reasonable service. 

So far, however, the religion of a college stu- 
dent has been described as it appears in every 
thoughtful age. There remains one aspect of 
the religious life which is peculiarly character- 
istic of a college student in this generation, and 
of which the Church in its relation to the young 
must take fresh account. Protestant teaching, 
from the time of Luther, has laid special em- 
phasis on the Pauline distinction between faith 
and works. It is not man's performance, either of 
moral obligations or of ritual observances, which 
justifies him in the sight of God. He must offer 
that consecration of the heart, that conversion 
of the nature, which makes him find his life in 
God. This teaching was a necessary protest 
against the externalism and formalism which 
had been for centuries regarded by many as of 
the essence of the religious life. " We are justi- 
fied by faith "; " The just shall live by faith " 
— these great words gave to religion its spirit- 
ual and personal significance as a religion be- 
tween the individual soul and the living God. 

4 6 



The Religion of a College Student 

But suppose that this touch of the life of God 
is felt by the soul of man, and that the soul de- 
sires to express its glad reaction — what is to be 
its channel of utterance? The history of 
Protestantism for the most part answers: 
u The organ of religious expression is the 
tongue. When the life is moved by the Holy 
Ghost, it is led to speak as the Spirit gives it 
utterance. It tells rejoicingly of its new birth; 
it confesses Christ before its fellows ; it preaches 
to others the message which has brought it 
hope and peace." Here is the basis of or- 
ganization in many Protestant churches — 
their meetings for free prayer; their confer- 
ences for religious revivals; their test of faith 
through spoken confession. It is a legitimate 
and inevitable way of self-expression. The 
life of the Spirit which descends from God to 
man leaps out of many lives into forms of 
speech as naturally as the water which de- 
scends from the hills leaps from its conduit 
into the air. 

What the present age, however, is teach- 
ing us, as the world was never taught before, 
is that another and equally legitimate chan- 
nel of expression is open to the life of faith. It 
is the language of works. We have come in 
these days to a time devoted in an unprecedented 

47 



Religious Education* c: zrican Citizen 

degree to the spirit of philanthropy. It is the 
age of social service. No life can yield itself to 
the current of the time without being swept into 
this movement of passionate fraternity and so- 
cial justice. But what is the attitude of the 
Christian Church to this modern phenomenon of 
social service? It is quite true that the Church 
is one of the most active agents of this jrtrilan- 
thropic renaissance. The sense of social re- 
sponsibility* is manifested by the prodigious in- 
crease of parish charities, parish organizations, 
institutional churches, and Christian benevol- 
ence. Has the Church, however, appreciated 
the organic relationship which exists between 
faith and works and which the movement of so- 
cial responsibility- represents? To do for others 
has seemed to the tradition of the Church a 
superadded and secondary effect of religion, 
rather than one of its essential and original 
tors. First, one is to be religious: and then, as 
a consequence or ornament of his religion, he 
is to concern himself with the better ordering 
of the human world. A much deeper relation 
between faith and works is indicated by those 
solemn words in which Jesus sums up, as he 
the whole Law and the Prophets. There 
is, he teaches, a kinship of nature between the 
love of God and the love of man. The second 



The Religion of a College Student 

commandment is like the first. Both are parts 
of a complete religion. When a modern life, 
that is to say, is moved by the spirit of philan- 
thropy, that impulse is not something from 
which the Church may stand apart and com- 
mend it as of another sphere. It is, in fact, one 
legitimate expression of the religious life; 
uttering itself not by the tongue, but by the hand, 
as though there had been heard the great word 
of the Apostle: "He that loveth not his 
brother whom he hath seen, how can he love 
God whom he hath not seen? " 

In other words, the Church has permitted 
the modern movement of philanthropy to pro- 
ceed as though it were not an essential part of 
the Christian life, when in reality this whole 
vast enterprise is the way in which the modern 
world is actually uttering that faith in the pos- 
sible redemption of mankind, to accomplish 
which the Church of Jesus Christ was ex- 
pressly designed and inspired. A Christian 
minister was visiting one day a Women's 
Settlement, established in the most squalid 
region of a great city and purifying the 
neighborhood with its unassuming devotion; 
and looking about him said: " This is a 
very beautiful work, but I wish there were 
more of Christ in it." How could there be 

49 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

more of Christ, one was moved to ask, than 
was already there? Would technical confes- 
sion or oral expression add any significance to 
such a work in His eyes who said: " Not every 
one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter 
into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth 
the will of my Father which is in heaven"? 
Might not Jesus, if he should come again on 
earth, pass without notice many a splendid 
structure reared in his name, and, seeking out 
these servants of the broken-hearted and the 
bruised of the world, say to them: "Inas- 
much as ye have done it unto one of the least 
of these my brethren, ye have done it unto 
me"? Why, then, is the Church not far- 
sighted enough to claim for itself what is 
justly its own? Why should it persist in 
restricting discipleship to a single way of ex- 
pression, when in fact the spirit of God is 
so obviously manifesting itself at the present 
time by another way of expression? Is not the 
most immediate problem which confronts the 
Church to-day that of finding a place within its 
own religious teaching for this new manifesta- 
tion of self-effacing philanthropy, and of claim- 
ing the age of social service as at heart an age 
of religious faith? 

At precisely this point, where the spirit of 
50 



The Religion of a College Student 

God is using as its modern language the service 
of man, the Christian Church meets the religion 
of the college student. The normal young man 
at the present time does not talk much about 
religion. Sometimes this reserve proceeds 
from self-consciousness and ought to be over- 
come, but quite as often it proceeds from mod- 
esty and ought to be respected. At any rate, 
such is the college student — a person disin- 
clined to much profession of piety, and not easy 
to shape into the earlier type of an orally ex- 
pressed discipleship. Yet, at the same time, 
this young man is extraordinarily responsive to 
the new call for human service. Xever in the 
history of education were so many young men 
and young women in our colleges profoundly 
stirred by a sense of social responsibility and a 
passion for social justice. The first serious 
question which the college student asks is not, 
" Can I be saved ? Do I believe ? " but, " What 
can I do for others? What can I do for those 
less fortunate than I? " Xo one can live in a 
community of these young lives without per- 
ceiving a quality of self-sacrificing altruism so 
beautiful and so eager that it is akin to the emo- 
tions which in other days brought in a revival 
of religion. 

What is the duty of the Church to a 

5i 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

mood like this? The duty — or rather the 
privilege of the Church — is to recognize that 
this is, in fact, a revival of religion; that in this 
generous movement of human sympathy there is 
a legitimate and acceptable witness of the life 
of God in the soul of the modern world. It 
may not be that form of evidence which other 
times have regarded as valid; it may, perhaps, 
not be the most direct way or the most adequate 
form of religious expression; but none the less 
it happens to be the way through which the 
Holy Spirit is at the present time directing the 
emotional life of youth to natural utterance. 
" I am not very religious," said one such youth 
one day, " but I should like to do a little to 
make of Harvard College something more than 
a winter watering-place. " But was not that 
youth religious? Was it not the Spirit of God 
which was stirring his young heart? Was 
he not repeating the Apostolic confession: 
" Shew me thy faith without thy works, and I 
will shew thee my faith by my works"? 
What, indeed, is the final object of religion if 
it is not the making of that better world which 
this youth in his dream desired to see? 

In this religion of a college student the teach- 
ers of religion must believe. They must take 
him as he is, and let him testify by conduct if 
52 



The Religion of a College Student 

he will not testify by words. If the student can 
be assured that the religion which the Church 
represents is a practical, working, ministering 
faith; if he can see that the mission of the 
Church is not the saving of a few fortunate 
souls from a wrecked and drifting world, but 
the bringing of the world itself, like a still sea- 
worthy vessel, with its whole cargo of hopes 
and fears, safe to its port; if he can believe that 
in the summons of the time to unselfish service 
he is in reality hearing the call of the living 
God; then he may come to regard the Church 
not, as he is often inclined to do, as an obstinate 
defender of impossible opinions, or a hothouse 
for exotic piety, or a cold-storage warehouse 
to preserve traditions which would perish in 
the open air; but as the natural expression of 
organized righteousness, the Body of those who 
are sanctified for others' sakes; and to such a 
Church he may offer his honest and practical 
loyalty. 

Such are the tests to which religion must 
submit if it would meet the needs of a college 
student — the tests of reality, reasonableness, 
and practical service. A religion without real- 
ity — formal, external, technical, obscurantist; 
a religion without reasonableness — omniscient, 
dogmatic, timid; a religion which does not dis- 

53 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

cern in the spirit of practical service a modern 
witness of the spirit of Christ — a religion thus 
organized and maintained may win the loyalty 
of emotional or theological or ecclesiastical 
minds, but it is not likely to be acceptable to the 
normal type of American youths. Their ardent 
and candid natures demand first a genuine, then 
a rational, and then a practical religion, and 
they are held to the Christian Church by no 
bond of sentiment or tradition which will pre- 
vent their seeking a more religious way of 
life. If they cannot find satisfaction for 
these demands in organized Christianity, then 
they will seek it elsewhere ; in the cause of social 
revolution or in the cult of some new faith. 
At any cost they must emancipate themselves 
from formalism and traditionalism and find the 
Truth which makes men free. 

What is this demand of healthy-minded youth 
but a challenge to the Church of Christ to re- 
new its vitality at the sources of power? The 
intellectual issues of the present time are too 
critical to be evaded; the practical philanthropy 
of the present time is too persuasive to be sub- 
ordinated or ignored. It is a time for the 
Church to forget its affectations and assump- 
tions, and to give itself to the reality of rational 
religion and to the practical redemption of an 
54 



The Religion of a College Student 

unsanctified world; and this return to simplicity 
and service will be at once a recognition of the 
religion of a college student and a renewal of 
the religion of Jesus Christ. 



SS 



IV 



THE UNIVERSITIES AND THE SOCIAL 
CONSCIENCE 

The most characteristic and significant discov- 
ery of the present generation — more epoch- 
making than the telephone or automobile or 
aeroplane, — is the discovery of the social con- 
science; — the recognition, in a degree unprece- 
dented in history, of social responsibility; the 
demand, with an unprecedented imperativeness, 
for social justice; the substitution, on an un- 
precedented scale, of social morality for the 
creed of individualism. Never in human his- 
tory were so many people, rich and poor, 
learned and ignorant, wise and otherwise, con- 
cerning themselves with social amelioration, 
dedicating themselves to philanthropy, organiz- 
ing for industrial change, or applying the mo- 
tives of religion to the problems of modern life. 
It is the age of the Social Question. A new 
phrase, the Social Organism, becomes the de- 
scription of human society. A new significance 
is found in the great affirmation of St. Paul, 

56 



Universities and the Social Conscience 

11 We are members one of another." The sin- 
gle life has become uninterpretable except in its 
relation to the life of others. The economics 
of laissez-faire is displaced by the economics of 
combination; the ethics of self-culture is suc- 
ceeded by the ethics of social service. The 
world, as a book which was among the first 
signs of the new spirit affirms in its title, " is the 
subject of redemption." " A single life," Pro- 
fessor Wallace has said, " may find salvation 
for itself, but it may be doubled whether such 
salvation is worth the trouble." 

Here is a transition in human history which 
can be compared with nothing less than the 
transition from the astronomy of Ptolemy 
to the astronomy of Copernicus. Instead of 
a centre of interest fixed in the individual 
life, round which, like satellites, the problems 
of the social order revolve, the life of the 
individual is now seen to lie within a vastly 
greater system, to whose laws its orbit must 
conform, and as a part of which its duty must 
be fulfilled. How to adjust one's personal 
aims within the organism of the common good; 
how to realize one's self as a member of the 
social body; how to secure the stability of the 
social order by the co-operative consecration of 
individuals — that is the essence of the modern 

57 



Religious Education of an American- Citizen 

Social Question, and it delivers one from the 
Ptolemaic ethics of self-centred morality and 
sets one in a Copernican universe of social unity 
and service. Here is not only a new social 
science, but a new social imperative; not merely 
a social consciousness, but a social conscience; 
a categorical summons to the person to fulfil his 
function within the social whole. 

If, then, this sense of social responsibility 
marks so unmistakably the thought and conduct 
of the present age; if the problems most im- 
mediately pressing upon civilization are the so- 
cial problems of the family, the State, the indus- 
trial order, and the Church; if we must thus 
think of people as living together, working to- 
gether, and determining their duty within the 
organism of the common good; then it becomes 
of peculiar interest to observe how far this 
transition in thought has proceeded, and at what 
point in its evolution the social conscience has 
arrived. What form of reinforcement is for 
the moment most important in this world-wide 
movement of social service? What new de- 
mand does this development of social sensitive- 
ness make upon the present age? 

The answer to these questions appears to be 
plain. The age of the social question has 
brought with it a vast expansion of certain 

58 



Universities and the Social Conscience 

sentiments which are among the most precious 
of human possessions, and which give to the 
present time a peculiar dignity and promise. 
Compassion, fraternity, generosity, loyalty, the 
passion for justice, the demand for conditions 
consistent with decency and self-respect — all 
these effects of the social conscience are operat- 
ing with unprecedented force. Never was 
there such generous giving, such willing enlist- 
ment in philanthropy, such varied legislation 
for social reform. If the better world could 
come through expenditure of money or time, 
through legislation or organization, through 
prodigal charity or loyal trade-unionism or mil- 
itant socialism, then the devotion and self-sacri- 
fice dedicated to these ends would have their 
immediate reward. The heart of the time is 
soft; the conscience of the time is quick. The 
age of the social question summons each life, 
however weak or inefficient it may be, to find 
its appropriate place in the vast organism of 
social efficiency and service. 

Yet while this expansion of social responsi- 
bility may be viewed with much satisfaction as 
a definite step in the moral education of the 
human race, the time has plainly come when 
the new movement of altruism is in special need 
of direction and control. It is like an electric 

59 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

current of high power, which has in it extraor- 
dinary capacity for social utility, but at the 
same time carries extraordinary risk. The 
first problem of the engineer is to develope 
such a current, but his next and not less essential 
problem is to safeguard and govern it. An un- 
regulated supply of power may not only bring 
disaster to the unwary passer-by, but may even 
wreck the mechanism designed for its trans- 
mission. It is a similar force of enthusiasm 
and responsibility which is now let loose in the 
modern world, and in any enterprise of social 
service one may count on a high-power current 
of generous emotion. Is this force, however, 
sufficiently insulated and safely distributed? 
Is social energy safeguarded by social wisdom? 
Is the social conscience of the time what the 
Apostle Paul described as a " good conscience," 
a sense of duty which can be trusted because it 
has been trained? 

No thoughtful observer can fail to see that 
the social question of the present time has just 
reached the point where emotional power needs 
a new degree of intellectual direction and dis- 
ciplined control. The administration of char- 
ity, for example, has passed beyond its senti- 
mental period, and in the complex life of our 
great cities the call for sympathy is succeeded 
60 



Universities and the Social Conscience 

by the call for expert knowledge. Sentimental- 
ism in relief may easily propagate more pov- 
erty than it cures; scientific relief is confronted 
by the much more difficult problem of harness- 
ing the forces of compassion within the mechan- 
ism of economic laws, so as to make sympathy 
effective and pity wise. Labor organization 
has had dramatic success in promoting loyalty 
and sacrifice, but now that it has become an 
economic force of high power, the time has ar- 
rived to determine whether its reckless use shall 
become a social menace, or its scientific insula- 
tion a social service. Employers, whether in- 
dividuals or corporations, seem, with many 
splendid exceptions, to have been taken by sur- 
prise in the new industrial conflict, and they 
meet the strategy of a more highly organized 
antagonist, sometimes with precipitate sur- 
render, sometimes with crude defences, and 
often with sheer bewilderment. 

And what a portentous series of hasty ex- 
periments we are making with all manner of 
legislation concerning the family, the drink- 
traffic, child-labor, unemployment, universal 
pensions, and a hundred other propositions 
of the time ! What is it that all these well- 
intended enterprises most immediately need? 
It is an accession of leadership, a supply of 

61 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

experts, an equipment of sympathy with wis- 
dom. Not less of heart is demanded to meet 
the increased complexity of social life, but 
more of head; not less sentiment, but more 
science; not less passion, but more patience. 
The social forces of the time have it in their 
power to wreck the very framework of Amer- 
ican democracy, unless they be directed by 
disciplined minds. " The great problem of 
free organization," wrote John Stuart Mill, in 
a paper only lately made public, " is the art of 
choosing leaders, with superior wisdom, ab- 
sence of egotism, truthfulness and moral sym- 
pathy." No more timely words could be 
spoken in the critical issues of industrial and 
political life which now confront American life. 
The modern social question cannot be fought 
through, or crowded through, or blundered 
through; it must be thought through. What 
was said by Marx of socialism is true of the 
social question, " The Reformation was the 
work of a monk; the revolution must be the 
work of a philosopher." Organization, ma- 
chinery, legislation, social programmes, are es- 
sential to the progress of the social question; 
but the solution of that question waits for a 
supply of wisdom without egotism, and of truth- 
fulness without cynicism. 
62 



Universities and the Social Conscience 

There is a further aspect of the same de- 
mand. The social question needs not only a 
science, but a philosophy. It must not only be 
approached by the scientific habit of mind, but 
it must be interpreted as a movement of ethical 
idealism. On its face the present agitation is 
an economic question, concerned with conditions 
of tariffs and industries, food and drink, hous- 
ing and rent, wages and hours, work and leis- 
ure; and many observers of the time have con- 
cluded that the key of the social question is to 
be found in some form of economic change. 
Shorten the hours of labor, they say, increase 
the wage, guarantee employment, insure against 
the risks of life, lift the level of earning farther 
from the margin of want, and the social ques- 
tion will be answered and social peace attained. 
The socialist propaganda gives to this view of 
progress the dignity of a philosophy. All so- 
cial progress is described as dependent on 
economic change. The institutions, morality, 
and religion of any age are products of its 
economic conditions. " Tell me how you get 
what you eat, and I will tell you what you are." 
The consistent socialist, therefore, declines all 
entangling alliances with other forms of social 
amelioration, and devotes himself wholly to 
economic revolution, with the assurance that the 

63 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

new industrial order will bring with it a new hu- 
man nature to utilize and enjoy it. 

This economic interpretation of history is, no 
doubt, encouraged by many facts, and it would 
be sheer sentimentalism to ignore the restora- 
tive effects of improved industrial conditions. 
But to see in the social question nothing more 
than a programme of economic revolution is 
to miss the very note which gives pathos and 
poignancy to the present agitation. The social 
question is not most clamorous where economic 
conditions are at their worst, and unheard where 
wages are highest, but on the contrary becomes 
most critical in those countries where production 
is most abundant and the conditions of the wage- 
earners most hopeful. The social question, in 
other words, is not a sign of economic de- 
cadence, but of economic progress. It meets 
people, not on their way down, but on their way 
up. It comes not of having less, but of want- 
ing more. It accompanies, not decrease of pos- 
sessions, but increase of desires. Though it ut- 
ter itself in the language of economic science, 
its origin and motives lie much deeper in hu- 
man life than the demand for a redistribution 
of wealth. 

What is this new note which is heard in the 
social movement, and which compels the atten- 

6 4 



Universities and the Social Conscience 

tion of the present age? It is the note of so- 
cial obligation; the demand for justice, op- 
portunity, the humanization of life. Very 
harsh and discordant are many of the voices 
which utter this cry of the time, but it is 
precisely in detecting beneath the bitterness, 
unreasonableness and incoherence of the social 
protest this underlying tone of moral passion 
and desire that the capacity to meet the issue is 
to be found. In short, the social question is at 
bottom an ethical question, whose interior nature 
must be interpreted in terms of morals, and 
whose appeal is finally made to the social con- 
science. 

At this point, then, the science of the so- 
cial question passes into its philosophy. It is 
not only true that the need of the time is for 
more competent leadership, but it is also true 
that this leadership must be equipped with an 
ethical idealism, and trained in the faith that 
such ethical idealism is the key alike of a sound 
philosophy and of a stable social world. The 
next step in social progress must be taken by men 
who shall combine the scientific habit of mind 
with the idealist's direction of the will. Social 
schemes must be made the servants of the social 
conscience. Social wisdom must rest on social 
philosophy. u Where there is no vision, the 

65 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

people perish." The river of healing for the 
social evils of the time flows from those high 
places where the streams of science and idealism 
meet. 

Where, then, are we to look for this new ap- 
preciation of social ethics which shall give direc- 
tion to the social conscience? Many sources of 
social sanity must be recognized and utilized, but 
it becomes evident that the new demand provides 
a new opportunity for the higher education. A 
university, if it is to fulfil in any degree its func- 
tion, is likely to influence in two ways the 
plastic life of youth. In the first place, it should 
train the scientific spirit into a ruling habit of the 
intellectual life. It should detach the growing 
mind from the entangling interests of practical 
affairs, and permit a view of things which has 
perspective, horizon, equanimity and grasp. 
Matthew Arnold said of Sophocles that he saw T 
things steadily and saw them whole. That is 
the best lesson which can be learned from an 
academic teacher — the capacity to look on the 
facts of life, not excitedly and passionately, but 
sanely and steadily, and to see them, not as frag- 
ments, but as parts of a comprehensive whole. 
It is sometimes said that academic people are 
theorists, and that what is needed to-day is prac- 
tical men. But what is it to theorize, and what 
66 



Universities and the Social Conscience 

is the relation of theory to practice? Theory, 
in its Greek signification, is the capacity for 
vision; the seeing things as they are; the survey 
of truth with a large horizon. And what is 
there so much needed in a practical age as this 
kind of theorist? Doers we have in plenty; 
but where are our seers? Action is eager 
enough; but where is vision? Views there are 
in abundance; but where are the leaders who 
have a view of life, its motives and aims, its inci- 
dents and enterprises, seen from the height of 
scientific detachment and judicious temper? 
These are the products of a liberal education, a 
training which liberates from the transient and 
incidental and finds the Truth which makes men 
free. 

In the second place, the centres of the higher 
learning share with the institutions of religious 
worship the supreme function of representing in 
national life a faith in ethical idealism. Educa- 
tion, it must be admitted, has been much modi- 
fied by the practical demands of the modern 
world; but it still remains true that our colleges 
and universities provide a natural atmosphere 
for the idealist's vision and hope. " A univer- 
sity," as President Gilman once said, " is a home 
of idealism ; if it were not that, it would be better 
that its walls should crumble in a night." In a 

6 7 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

worthy place of learning these two factors 
of faith in the Eternal meet in the mak- 
ing of a scholar's mind. On the one hand, 
the great masters of thought, the great ideas of 
the reason, the universal laws of science, the per- 
ennial persuasions of art, invite the mind be- 
yond the fragmentary and temporary to see 
things steadily and see them whole; and on the 
other, there looks up to these heights of the ideal 
the unspoiled life of youth, not yet bent down 
by the tasks of life, but erect and responsive, 
with the " rays of dawn on their white shields of 
expectation." These are our natural idealists. 
The vision splendid has not yet faded into the 
light of common day. The character of youth 
has not yet been hardened by the rub of life, or 
subdued to that it works in, like the dyer's hand. 
Young people, among the influences of academic 
life, have their own faults; they are often care- 
less, reckless and self-confident; but they have 
not yet been smitten with the maladies of the 
worldly-wise, with hopelessness, loss of vision, 
the atrophy of sensibility or the scorn of ideal- 
ism. The spirit of youth looks upon the world 
as fluid and malleable, like a stream of molten 
metal flowing to the mould which the artist has 
designed. A liberal education has failed of its 
main intention if it does not prolong and justify 
68 



Universities and the Social Conscience 

the natural idealism of healthy-minded youth. 
At this point, then, the universities and the 
social conscience meet. By one of the most in- 
teresting transitions in the history of education 
the academic life has made a new connection 
with the modern world. Instead of being side- 
tracked in scholasticism and dilettantism, the 
higher education in science and in philosophy has 
been developed into a trunk-line, which leads 
from learning to life. A new series of studies 
has been incorporated in the curriculum of the 
universities. Where, a generation ago, scarcely 
a single academic course, offered in any country, 
approached the social question as a problem of 
philosophy, to-day, in Germany, France, Great 
Britain and the United States, no university re- 
gards its system of instruction as complete with- 
out proposing to apply the principles of ethics to 
the questions of the social order, and enlisting 
trained recruits for the army of social service. 
No group of studies proves more inviting to the 
students than those which thus analyze and in- 
terpret the problems of modern society. A new 
department of research opens a window from 
college studies to the working world, and looks 
out upon a new horizon of duty. Education is 
touched, in an unprecedented degree, by the 
spirit of social morality. Students in large and 

6 9 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

increasing numbers voluntarily associate them- 
selves in various forms of social service, and 
throw themselves into these undertakings of 
philanthropy with athletic zest. A new profes- 
sion is in process of creation, and it has as yet 
the peculiar advantage of being one of the few 
vocations now inviting educated men and women 
where the demand still outruns the supply. 
This response of the universities to the call of 
the social conscience has already had perceptible 
effects in the social struggle itself. The finest 
expression, for example, of modern philan- 
thropy — that self-effacing neighborliness which 
we call the Settlement System — was de- 
vised by a university tutor, established by uni- 
versity students, and for years bore the title of 
the University Settlement plan. Industrial re- 
form feels the same effect of academic idealism. 
The employing class have been, for the most 
part, reluctantly driven to social amelioration, 
and the more important steps have been taken by 
an unexpected combination of wage-earners and 
idealists. The labor movement in Great Brit- 
ain is little else than the idealism of Carlyle and 
Ruskin translated into the language of working- 
class organization and protest; and what the 
working-class movement at the present time 
70 



Universities and the Social Conscience 

most definitely needs in all lands is more knowl- 
edge and saner leadership. How to know 
enough to be of real use; how to see enough to 
be a real leader; how to be good enough to be 
good for something — that is the new problem 
of social service, which gives to academic train- 
ing its new importance in the moral education 
of the human race. 

Nor can one stop even here in this estimate 
of education in its relation to the social con- 
science. It is not only true that the appeal of 
the social conscience is expanding and moraliz- 
ing the sphere of the academic life, but it is still 
further true that there may be discerned within 
the universities, emerging from this new moral 
enthusiasm, that Religion of a College Student 
which has already been described. What is this 
call of the time to educated youth which sum- 
mons them to social service? What are these 
motives of self-effacing usefulness, this dissatis- 
faction with the self-centred life, this summons 
to find life in losing it, if they are not a reitera- 
tion of the appeal which in all the ages of faith 
have turned men from self-seeking to self-sacri- 
fice, and revealed the life of God touching the 
souls of men? 

There are many channels through which hu- 

7i 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

man experience is led toward this co-operation 
with the Divine purpose and made a laborer 
together with God. Sometimes this fulfilment 
of life is reached through the conclusions of the 
reason, sometimes through the exaltation of the 
emotions; but it is not impossible that the pres- 
ent age is in an unprecedented and often un- 
recognized way drawing young lives toward 
the Eternal through the dedication of the 
will to human service. The new humanism may 
utter itself in language unfamiliar to the tradi- 
tions of religion; it may speak to many religious 
people in an unknown tongue ; but if it be, in its 
interior nature, a spiritual movement, then it 
may also be the first premonition of a renais- 
sance of religious responsibility and consecra- 
tion. A great movement of social morality is 
not likely to fulfil itself without expanding into 
a new type of religious life. The social move- 
ment, followed to its highest expression, leads 
one up to religion; and religion, made generous 
and self-forgetting, leads one down to service. 
The socialization of religion meets the spiritual- 
ization of the social conscience. The discovery 
of the social conscience may open a way to the 
still more epoch-making discovery of a more 
adequate, stable and socialized religious faith. 
The call of the Social Question, which the young 
72 



Universities and the Social Conscience 

men and women of the present generation so dis- 
tinctly hear and so gladly obey, may prove in the 
end to be, not only a summons to the service of 
man, but not less audibly a call from God. 



73 



THE RELIGIOUS EDUCATION OF AN AMERICAN 
CITIZEN 

It is only a small minority of American youths 
who may approach the problems of citizenship 
by way of the college or the university. All, 
however, by one way or another, through the 
sheltered path of the higher education or along 
the rougher road of work and wage-earning, en- 
ter in early manhood into that eager and tumul- 
tuous life which has given to the civilization of 
the United States its peculiar characteristics 
both of promise and of peril. The young man 
becomes a citizen. He marries, and in greater 
or less degree of comfort and stability makes 
for himself a home; he throws himself into 
his career; he takes his share in the political 
life of his town, his State, his nation. In 
this environment of a community and a coun- 
try his own soul must live, if live it can. Here 
are the inevitable conditions of his religious life. 
How, then, shall he adjust himself to them? 
What has he to anticipate for his own spiritual 
nature in this larger world? What may this 
74 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

new transition in experience involve? What 
is to be the religious education of an American 
citizen? 

In approaching this question one must again 
begin with definitions. Religious education, as 
has already been pointed out, is not attained by 
accepting a theological system, or concurring in 
an ancient creed, or learning by rote a prescribed 
catechism, however desirable or essential these 
acquisitions may be. Religious education 
means, as the words imply, the drawing out of 
the religious nature, the clarifying and strength- 
ening of religious ideals, the enriching and ra- 
tionalizing of the sense of God. Religious edu- 
cation is, therefore, not to be imposed from 
without, but to be developed from within. It 
assumes the susceptibility and responsiveness of 
human life to the approaches of the Divine life, 
and by every influence of suggestion and environ- 
ment clears the way by which the love of God 
may reach the soul of man. Education thus be- 
comes, as Lessing announced it to be, revelation; 
— the disclosure to the will of man of the will of 
God. 

Nor is this the whole of religious educa- 
tion. A life which has thus acquired a quick- 
ened and active sense of Divine control becomes 
inevitably associated with God's purpose for the 

IS 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

world, so far as that may be revealed. Revela- 
tion thus passes over into dedication. The end 
of education is service. The consciousness of 
God directs one's will to the establishing of the 
Kingdom of God. The life that is sanctified be- 
comes sanctified for others' sakes. The daily 
prayer of a religiously educated life is not only: 
" Thy will be done," but not less : " Thy king- 
dom come." 

And if this is religious education what, on 
the other hand, is an American citizen? He is 
not merely one who has acquired the right to 
vote, or has a stake in the property of the nation, 
or has been rescued from a condition of hyphen- 
ization. He is one who with the privileges has 
accepted the obligations of American citizenship. 
He has found in the conditions and opportunities 
of American democracy that sphere of personal 
and social action which is to him most welcome 
and congenial. An American citizen does not 
wish he were born under a monarchical or aris- 
tocratic or feudal system; he does not view the 
experimental imperfections of Democracy with 
condescension or contempt; he prefers a civiliza- 
tion in the making to a civilization which is 
ready-made, the risks of a rushing stream to the 
risks of a stagnant pool. Faith in democracy is 
the atmosphere in which he has been born and 

7 6 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

bred; or for the sake of that faith he has 
ventured across the sea. In the vast and 
seething melting-pot of American civilization 
there is fulfilling itself, he believes, a mighty 
process through which the gold of national 
character is to be precipitated and the hetero- 
geneous elements of American life are to be 
purified as by fire. 

If then he is to receive a religious education, 
it must be wrought out of these conditions of 
American citizenship. There must be no con- 
flict of authority, no ecclesiastical law over- 
riding or obstructing national law. Religion 
is not to be reserved for days of worship 
only, or occasions of special need, or citizen- 
ship to be habitually conducted as if there 
were no God of righteousness or love. Life 
must be integral and harmonious. The in- 
stitutions of American citizenship, just as they 
are, with all their imperfections and blunders, 
must be the instruments of a religious life. If 
the Kingdom of God is to come in America it 
must come through the agencies of citizenship. 
To contribute to their stability and develope 
their possibilities is not only to be a loyal citizen, 
but at the same time to get a practical education 
in religion. Patriotism and personality must 
thrive together. The freedom of citizenship 

77 



Religious Education of an American Citizln 

must be a part of that religious loyalty whose 
service is perfect freedom. 

But is this unity of experience attainable? 
Can there be any such identity of motives in citi- 
zenship and religion? Are not the principles 
and practices of American life hopelessly re- 
moved from the ideal of a Kingdom of God? 
Is not family life in the United States disinte- 
grated and declining; are not business dealings 
degraded by brutality and fraud; is not political 
action tainted by self-interest and partisanship; 
are not international negotiations corrupted by 
tortuous diplomacy and broken pledges ? What 
chance is there in such a soil for the growth and 
flowering of a religious life? How can one 
meet the problems of an American home, or 
make his living by the methods of American 
business, or tolerate the scheming of American 
politics, or see his country entering into the 
mighty rivalries of the World-Powers, without 
frankly recognizing that the service of God has 
been abandoned for the service of Mammon, 
and the Kingdom of God supplanted by the king- 
doms of this world? Must not a choice be 
made between religious education and American 
citizenship? If one would lead a consistently 
religious life must he not separate himself from 
the normal conduct of the modern world as the 

78 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

saints of the Middle Ages fled from the corrup- 
tion of their time to the spiritual security of 
monastic cells? Has not the tragic history of 
three years of war demonstrated that the way 
to security and success, for either a citizen or a 
nation, leads to an end where the ideals of 
equity and mercy are no longer within the hori- 
zon of practical affairs, and where from dreams 
of a Utopia of faith and prayer one is rudely 
waked into a Godless world? 

It must be candidly admitted that many signs 
of the present time go far to justify this scep- 
ticism. The colossal tragedy which is over- 
whelming Europe, and the hardly less demoral- 
izing consequences of commercial inflation and 
moral neutrality in this country, have put an 
unprecedented strain on the faith of the idealist, 
and have encouraged the prophets of a degen- 
erate and materialized world. The institution 
of the family, we are told, has become little 
more than the survival of a pleasant and primi- 
tive fiction. The business world has become a 
scene of war, where great alliances of wage- 
earners attack the central powers of capital in 
their trenches of privilege; and as for political 
life, whether local, national, or international, 
there is, it is said, no law but force, no strength 
but in numbers, no peace but through power, and 

79 



Religious Education of ax American Citizen 

no permanent escape from the present hell of 
war. It is a good time, therefore, to examine 
once more these pillars of our civilization, and 
to consider whether they are thus tottering in 
decay. 

It is obvious that the easy optimism which 
satisfied many minds before the cyclone of war 
swept down upon the world is no longer a prac- 
ticable philosophy. The cheerful song of 
Pippa, " God's in His heaven, all's right with 
the world," no longer strikes the prevailing note 
of so stern and distracting a time. But is it 
true that the terrific events which have laid this 
easy faith in ruins have swept away with it the 
whole structure of idealism, as though the cy- 
clone were a deluge from which no dry land was 
ever to emerge? Is it certain that the pillars of 
a good world are crumbling? Must civilization 
be reconstructed on a new and untried plan? 
Has American citizenship parted company for- 
ever from religious education; and has the 
world lost not only millions of precious lives, but 
also its still more precious soul? 

On the contrary, even if one looks at things 
just as they are and accepts without evasion the 
solemn challenge of the time, there meet him, 
in the very institutions of citizenship which ap- 
pear to be so gravely threatened, the condi- 
80 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

tions of rational faith and the instruments of 
national character. It is not that the material 
of a religious education has been destroyed, but 
that it has in large degree been undiscovered. 
It is not that the pillars of our social order are 
rotten, but that they have not been tested. It 
is not, Mr. Chesterton has said, that Christian- 
ity has been tried and found wanting; it is that 
it has been found difficult and never tried. It 
is not, as many believe, that in a time like this 
there is nothing left of religion, but on the con- 
trary, that in a time like this there is nothing 
but religion left. 

Let us recall once more the social institutions 
which create the environment of American citi- 
zenship, and observe their nature and effect. 
Each when closely examined exhibits a twofold 
character, and the anxious or sceptical critic may 
be easily confused or misled. Each has its ex- 
ternal defects and disasters, but each in its in- 
terior character is a witness of the motives of 
idealism and depends on these motives for sta- 
bility and permanence. 

The institution of the family, for example, 
is, it is true, threatened by light-mindedness 
and lust. One marriage in twelve in the 
United States is, we are told, shattered by 
divorce. Yet, on the other hand, nothing 

81 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

is more obvious than the ethical significance 
and the unparalleled effect on citizenship of the 
normal type of family life in the United States. 
If it be true that one union in twelve is broken, it 
is not less true that eleven out of twelve survive. 
If it be true that the family is often corrupted 
by commercialism and self-interest, it is not less 
true that it is much oftener perpetuated by un- 
constrained and self-effacing love. An epidemic 
of social disease should not obscure the more 
prevalent condition of general social health. 
All competent observers, whether from Europe 
or from the Orient, agree in the conclusion that 
the domestic type evolved from the conditions 
of American civilization is a unique contribution 
to the moral education of the race, and that a 
free Democracy finds its original and clearest 
expression in the free union of partners through 
mutual affection and restraint. In this fertile 
soil of the American family the religious educa- 
tion of a citizen begins. In this relationship, 
first as child, then as husband or wife, and then 
as parent, the great majority of American citi- 
zens receive their first lessons in altruism and 
learn to sanctify themselves for others' sakes. 
The immediate problem of the family in 
American life is therefore not one of criticism or 
apology or the devising of ways to escape from 
82 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

so antiquated a compulsion, but on the contrary, 
the problem of the utilization, simplification and 
safe-guarding of that union. The vitality of 
religion in the mature experience of citizens who 
must accept the stress and haste of American life 
is primarily dependent on the reality of that re- 
ligion which they have acquired under the con- 
ditions of an uncorrupted, simple, and happy 
home. The Kingdom of God which is the end 
of religious education is nothing else than the 
realization of that social ideal whose germinal 
type is the normal family. " Except ye turn," 
said Jesus, " and become as little children, ye 
shall not enter into the kingdom of God." It 
was a summons from the complexity and con- 
fusion of the world to the instincts and impulses 
which are naturally learned at a mother's knee; 
and this recall to the original sources of religious 
education the American citizen must turn to 
hear. 

When one passes from the religious educa- 
tion provided by the home to the circumstances 
of industrial and commercial life in the United 
States at the present time, he is met by a still 
more convinced and passionate scepticism. 
Modern business, we are told, is nothing else 
than organized piracy. " There is no such 
thing," it is said, " as an ethical bargain. 

83 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

There are no honest goods to buy or sell. . . . 
The hideous competitive war makes the indus- 
trial order seem like the triumph of hell and 
madness on earth." " The business man who is 
not willing to be a wolf cannot remain in his 
business." Many signs of the business world 
unquestionably confirm this counsel of despair. 
The war between the rival forces of industry is 
often cruel and merciless, and lust of gain on the 
one side is matched by reckless hate on the other. 
It is as hard as it was in the time of Jesus Christ 
for those who trust in riches to enter into the 
Kingdom of God. The habit of acquisition 
easily becomes an insidious disease, and the hand 
which has become prehensile in its grasp grows 
paralyzed when it would open its palm. A time 
of inflated prosperity and unbridled extrava- 
gance is called to hear once more the word of 
Jesus: " What shall it profit a man, if he shall 
gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? " 
Must we, however, conclude that this great 
area of human conduct, in which the vast major- 
ity of American citizens necessarily pass most of 
their waking hours, provides no field for a relig- 
ious education? On the contrary, the essential 
nature of business life is not, as is so freely af- 
firmed, irretrievably base and sordid, but dis- 
ciplinary, educative, and creative. In the form 

8 4 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

of productive effort, through agriculture, manu- 
facture and the mechanic arts, business life is a 
vast organization of social service, existing to 
provide others with what they want; and in the 
form of finance or the exchange of values, busi- 
ness life is a still more elaborate organization of 
credit, existing through mutual integrity and 
good faith. It is sometimes fancied that a man 
is best equipped for business success by audacity, 
unscrupulousness and cunning. The truth is, 
however, that for one man who profits by luck 
or fraud a thousand owe all they have gained to 
integrity and uncorruptibility. The profits of 
honorable persistency are on the whole vastly 
greater than the profits of recklessness or fraud. 
Business life, in other words, just as it is, with 
all its solicitations to unscrupulousness, offers at 
least a fair chance for the religious education of 
an American citizen. Its temptations set one, it 
is true, as on a high mountain where the king- 
doms of this world lie at one's feet, and the 
promise is heard : " All these things will I give 
thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me " ; 
but it is as possible in America as it was in Pal- 
estine to answer : " Get thee hence, Satan ! " 
and to turn from the passion for the kingdoms 
of this world to the much more persuasive pas- 
sion for the Kingdom of God. 

8 5 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

As one looks, then, at the opportunities of 
modern business now offered to sagacious and 
far-sighted Americans, the first impression 
which is made by the prevailing habit of mind 
in many men of business is not so much of 
its cupidity as of its stupidity. They are so 
preoccupied with the chances of immediate 
profit or with the temporary contentions of 
commercial life that they do not see the new 
world of industrial opportunity which is even 
now knocking at their doors. They have not 
discovered that the labor question has been 
converted into a human question; that they 
must in future deal not merely with mechanical 
processes but with the passions and desires 
of human beings; and that if they do not 
want contention, bitterness and revolt, they must 
provide equity, fraternity and the right to a hu- 
man life. " A trade," it has been wisely said, 
" is that which a man follows in order to live; 
and a profession is that to follow which a man 
lives." x The problem of modern industrial 
life, in other words, is the lifting of trades into 
professions, the humanizing of handiwork, the 
conversion of tasks to which workers are called 
into " vocations " which call to the workers. 

1 Henry Jones, Idealism as a Practical Creed, Glasgow, 
1909, p. 118. 

86 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

Here is where business sagacity — not to say 
business sanity — now begins. It organizes 
schemes of industrial co-operation, conciliation, 
or partnership, not merely to escape the wastage 
of industrial war, but to unite the forces of pro- 
duction and distribution as a league to enforce 
industrial peace, not as a device of patronage 
but as an expression of fraternalism and justice. 
Business stability in the future of American life 
is to be dependent in an unprecedented degree 
on a fresh accession of social responsibility and 
co-operative conscientiousness, and the man of 
business who commits himself to sound experi- 
mentation in this field of industrial fraternalism 
will find in his business career itself the material 
and the motives of a religious education. 

When one passes finally from the problems of 
home and of business to the political conditions 
of this amazing and bewildering time, he is met 
by a still more tragic sense of maladjustment 
and confusion. In the wranglings of partisan- 
ship and the horrors of war, what is left, one 
asks himself, of the ideals of religion and the 
vision of a Kingdom of God? Has not govern- 
ment become a mere struggle for spoils and 
diplomacy a mere game of gamblers? Have 
not the masses of citizens become mere pawns 
in a great game? Are not small principalities 

87 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

transferred from one great Power to another, 
as Lord John Russell once said, like firkins of 
butter passed from hand to hand? How can 
one talk of education in religion when the world 
is being educated in the art of slaughter, or lift 
up his thoughts to a heaven of peace when he is 
thrust down into a hell of war? 

And yet, through the thick darkness of the 
present time, with its uninterpretable mysteries 
and its irremediable losses, one ray of light 
already reaches the stricken world and illu- 
minates the tragic scene. Whatever else is 
still hidden in the shadows of an unexplored 
future, this at least has already become plain 
— that through the suffering and sorrow of the 
time, and its daily summons to face the su- 
preme demands of life and death, there is 
occurring in all nations a vast process of re- 
ligious education; and that the sense of man's 
dependence and God's guidance is in a totally 
unprecedented degree becoming real and effi- 
cient in millions of lives. On this point the 
testimony both from the men in the trenches and 
from their trembling friends at home is beyond 
dispute. Much as has been lost, God, in a mul- 
titude of instances, has been found. Men who 
have been, as they themselves believed, irre- 
trievably enslaved by levity or self-indulgence, 
88 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

are finding themselves sobered, chastened, eman- 
cipated, and redeemed. Impulses and desires 
which they had thought outgrown with the 
clothes and sports of childhood, now reassert 
themselves with a new authority, and the ideals 
of loyalty, sacrifice, contrition and devotion to 
the will of God have become clarified and com- 
pelling. These lives have been saved, " yet so 
as by fire and the fire is trying every man's 
work, of what sort it is." 

Such a baptism by fire is not likely to be 
soon forgotten. Many aspects of religion, 
which have hitherto seemed important, will, 
we may anticipate, no longer command from 
these lives even a lingering interest. The con- 
flicts of sects, the claims of sacerdotalism, the 
elaboration of creeds, and the aestheticism of 
worship, which have so often preoccupied the 
minds of theologians and ecclesiastics, will seem 
remote and unreal to men who have crouched in 
the trenches facing eternity and meditating on 
death. It may even happen, as has been sug- 
gested, that many people will have to leave the 
Church in order to be Christians. Yet of the 
reality of religion itself, the communion of the 
soul with God, the renewal of faith through one 
supreme act of self-effacing loyalty, — of all this 
there will be a new assurance, and those who 

8 9 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

have found in their terrific experiences a cour- 
age, patience, and peace of mind unknown to 
them in peaceful days, may return from the 
front — if they return at all — as missionaries 
return from the terrors of the jungle to teach 
their stay-at-home and unawakened brethren the 
elementary principles of a rational religious life. 
An English author, whose extraordinary 
gifts have often been tainted by sensualism 
and cynicism, has testified to this discovery 
of God through the solemn experience of these 
illuminating years. " I believe," writes Mr. 
H. G. Wells, " that only through a complete 
simplification of religion to its fundamental idea, 
to a world-wide realization of God as the King 
of the heart and of all mankind, . . . can man- 
kind come to any certain security and happiness. 
. . . I conceive myself to be thinking as the 
world thinks, and if I find no great facts, I find 
a hundred little indications to reassure me that 
God comes. Even those who have neither the 
imagination nor the faith to apprehend God as a 
reality will, I think, realize presently that the 
Kingdom of God over a world-wide system of 
republican States is the only possible formula 
under which we may hope to unify and save man- 
kind." 1 What is this extraordinary confession 

1 Italy, France and Britain at tear, Macmillan, 1917, p. 284. 
90 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

of a mind completely alienated from organized 
Christianity but a testimony to religious educa- 
tion, a cleansing of motives and a vision of 
service, which — as they are realized in millions 
of lives — may in the end make these years of 
tragedy — if not wholly interpretable or atoned 
for — at least an epoch of spiritual revival and 
rational faith? 

And if this is what can happen through the 
blood-stained ministry of war, may it not 
conceivably happen through a more complete 
understanding of the nature and problems 
of a world at peace ? Must we wait to stand in 
the immediate presence of death before we can 
learn how to live ? Is physical carnage the only 
way to spiritual courage ? Is God to be found 
nowhere but in the trenches? Or is it possible 
that the religious education which has been 
wrought out of the disasters of war may be per- 
petuated and reinforced among the not less diffi- 
cult problems of the world that is to be? Shall 
we not emerge from this eclipse of idealism into 
a saner, simpler, and more convincing type of 
religion? Must the lessons of soldierliness be 
learned in an era of destruction alone, or may 
one amid the more subtle perils of a recon- 
structed world become a good soldier of Jesus 
Christ? That is the solemn question which 

9 1 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

confronts modern civilization as it begins to 
grope its way through the present horror to the 
problems that lie beyond the war. " A com- 
plete simplification of religion," " an assurance 
that God comes," " a Kingdom of God over a 
world-wide system of Republican States," — this 
" formula," by which " we may hope to unify 
and save mankind " is not for armies and navies 
alone to teach, but for consecrated citizenship 
to verify by experience. This is what religion is 
to mean in the world that is at our doors; and in 
contributing to this universal end must be ful- 
filled the religious education of each American 
citizen. 



92 



VI 

THE AMERICAN CHARACTER 

The American citizen, whether he be college- 
bred or not, finds himself in early manhood 
thrown into a world of extraordinary opportuni- 
ties, advantages, temptations and risks. In 
some aspects the history of the United States re- 
peats the experience of other types of civiliza- 
tion, but in other and fundamental traits it is a 
story without precedent, both in its external 
forms and in its effects on national character. 
The first impression which this social history is 
likely to create in an observer's mind is that of 
a population singularly devoted to commercial 
aims. " Beyond striving for gold," a foreign 
critic has lately remarked, " the Americans have 
no ideal. They think everything can be 
achieved by gold. Their megalomania makes 
a grotesque impression. " 

It is not surprising that this is the effect 
which a hasty survey of American life may 
produce. No economic phenomenon of the 

93 



Religious Education of ax American Citizen 

modern world is so vast in dimensions or so 
conspicuous in effects as the growth in wealth 
exhibited during the last fifty years by the 
United States. It has become the richest na- 
tion in the world, and the volume of pros- 
perity increases with amazing and acceler- 
ated rapidity. Commercial life is, therefore, 
the immediate environment in which the Ameri- 
can citizen must meet the problems of his own 
life. He applies himself with eager expectancy 
to get his full share of the abundance which na- 
ture and skill have placed within his reach. 
Most of his waking hours are devoted to the 
making of a living. The great majority of the 
American people are primarily concerned with 
industrial production or affairs of trade. Pro- 
fessional independence, artistic detachment, or 
contemplative seclusion, is much less practicable 
in the swift and fluid movement of American civ- 
ilization than in the immobility of European or 
Oriental life. The making of money or the 
spending of it, or the advising about money-mat- 
ters, make the most conspicuous occupations of 
American citizens, and for the sake of these 
commercial opportunities great multitudes of 
sanguine money-seekers have crossed the sea. 
In spite of the invasion of trade by the Eng- 
lish nobility, the European tradition has on the 
94 



The American Character 

whole regarded commercial life as below the 
level of a self-respecting aristocracy, and in an- 
cient Japan even artisans and farmers held a 
higher place in the social hierarchy than mer- 
chants or bankers. In the United States, on the 
other hand, an unsubdued and unexplored conti- 
nent has summoned both enterprise and genius 
to commercial life, and the vocations of manu- 
facture, transportation, and production have 
come to possess at least equal standing with pro- 
fessional careers. With this marvellous expan- 
sion of industry the demand for competent di- 
rection has become even more imperative, and 
the administration of commercial affairs claims 
the highest talent. Schools of training for 
business rank with other graduate schools at 
the universities, and the most tempting prizes, 
not only of income but of national distinction, 
are won by the leaders in trade or finance. 
If, then, there is to be developed a national 
character which is indigenous and typical, it 
must be wrought out of these conditions of 
economic progress. In a degree unprecedented 
in history the United States is a commercial 
democracy. 

Nor is there anything essentially discreditable 
in these commercial aims. Few persons are, on 
the whole, more respectably engaged than when 

95 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

they are busy in securing by honest labor for 
themselves and for those whom they love the 
means of self-support and comfort. What is it, 
then, in this vast economic development which 
may prove disastrous to the American charac- 
ter? It is the confusion of the spirit of indus- 
trialism with the spirit of commercialism. In- 
dustrialism is creative, constructive, educative. 
It is engaged in making things which other peo- 
ple want, or in bringing things where other 
people want them. It is the organization of 
production and distribution. Commercialism, 
on the other hand, is a habit of mind, a social 
creed, a trader's point of view, which estimates 
all values by the money-standard and hopes 
to obtain by money things which money cannot 
buy. Good and evil, success and failure, are 
to the spirit of commercialism not ethical, but 
monetary terms. 

The spirit of commercialism, for example, 
speaks of a " good marriage " when there 
may be in the contract nothing good except 
money. The spirit of commercialism calls a 
man " successful " though the skeleton of 
moral bankruptcy may be hidden in the closet of 
industrial success. The spirit of commercialism 
describes a man as " worth a million " when he 
may be in fact worth nothing or much less than 

9 6 



The American Character 

nothing. The spirit of commercialism, in other 
words, translates such words as possession, suc- 
cess, or worth, from an ethical to a financial 
vocabulary. " At the cross of the transepts of 
Milan Cathedral,'' Ruskin writes, " has lain for 
three hundred years the embalmed body of Saint 
Carlo Borromeo. It holds a golden crozier 
and has a cross of emeralds on his breast. Ad- 
mitting the crozier and emeralds as useful 
articles, is the body to be considered as hav- 
ing them? Do they in the politico-economi- 
cal sense of property belong to it? If not, 
and if we may therefore conclude generally 
that a dead body cannot possess property, 
what degree and period of animation in the 
body will render possession possible? As thus, 
lately, in the wreck of a California ship, one 
of the passengers fastened a belt about him with 
two hundred pounds of gold in it, with which he 
was found afterward at the bottom. Now, as 
he was sinking, had he the gold, or had the gold 
him? " * This is precisely the problem which 
confronts an industrial democracy. What de- 
gree of animation must one have in himself 
to possess in fact the property which is ap- 
parently his own? As he is sinking from the 
ship of industrialism into the sea of commercial- 

1 Unto This Last, Essay IV. Ad valorem. 

97 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

ism, shall we say that he has his gold, or that his 
gold has him? 

Here, then, is the fallacy which threatens in- 
dustrial America — the illusion of wealth, the 
perversion of happiness, the deceptiveness of 
possession. Yet the American character is but 
half defined when it is thus identified with a sor- 
did and vulgar commercialism. By one of the 
most dramatic coincidences in human history the 
same nation which has become thus committed 
to commercial enterprise is at the same time the 
heir of a great tradition of moral and religious 
idealism. The early settlers of the Western 
continent were not freebooters or buccaneers, 
tempted across the sea by the lust of gold, but 
sober and God-fearing exiles, seeking freedom 
to worship God according to the dictates of their 
consciences. No historical event was ever more 
free from the spirit of commercialism than the 
founding of New England. " We are called to 
enter," said Governor Winthrop, " into a cove- 
nant with God for this work. We have taken 
up a commission. . . . For this work we must 
be knit together as one man; we must uphold a 
familiar converse together in all meekness, gen- 
tleness, patience and liberty. So shall we keep 
the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. We 
shall find that the God of Israel is among us, so 

9 8 



The American Character 

that men shall say of succeeding plantations, 
' The Lord make it like to that of New Eng- 
land.' " It was much the same with what Win- 
throp called " succeeding plantations." Ger- 
man Pietists ventured into the defiles of the 
Alleghenies, believing that the weakness of God 
was stronger than the arrows of Indians. Eng- 
lish Quakers named their commonwealth after 
William Penn and their settlement the " City 
of Brotherly Love." Peace-loving Moravians 
reared at Bethlehem and Salem new " Hills of 
the Lord," like their sacred Herrnhut in Eastern 
Prussia. Huguenot refugees found asylum in 
the colony at Charleston. " These all," as the 
Apostle said of his own ancestors, " being 
destitute, afflicted, tormented . . . obtained a 
good report through faith." They were not 
commercialists but idealists. They desired not 
a richer country, but a better one. They so- 
journed, as Paul said of Abraham, " in a strange 
country," looking for a city whose foundations 
were not in trade but in God. 

Spiritual inheritances like these may be ob- 
scured from time to time by the bulk of pros- 
perity which has been superimposed on these 
foundations, or may be ignored among the 
more complex conditions of trade and wealth. 
It may even become the fashion for descend- 

99 



Religious Education of ax American Citizen 

ants of the Puritans to look back with con- 
descension or contempt on the rigors of the 
earlier conscience and the hardness of a 
primitive faith. Yet whenever it happens that 
the American character is put to the test of 
magnanimity, generosity, sacrifice, compassion, 
or religious faith, these spiritual inheritances re- 
assert themselves like a hereditary strain in the 
nation's blood, and inspire action as with a call 
from the ancestral past. Deeper than the hab- 
its of a commercialized generation is this suscep- 
tibility to the motives of idealism. The same 
people who are so keen in trade and so gifted 
with initiative and foresight in money-making, 
have offered to the modern world its most im- 
pressive evidences of a national character domi- 
nated by spiritual aims. n A race of men," a 
discerning observer of American life has said, 
" carrying on commerce merely in order to live, 
feeling no idealism impelling them to industry, 
would never have produced such tangible re- 
sults or gained such power. . . . Moral earn- 
estness has not been a mere episode in the life 
of America." ■ 

The single instance of organized religion sus- 
tained by voluntary offerings is a sufficient il- 
lustration of this truth. Instead of the State 

1 Munsterberg, The Americans, pp. 254, 356. 
IOO 



The American Character 

Churches of Europe, maintained from public 
funds, ruled by bishops who may be designated 
by prime ministers, and by clergy who are of- 
ficials of government, the administration of re- 
ligion in the United States represents in an un- 
precedented degree the persistent idealism of a 
free nation. Without State subsidy, except by 
that benevolent neutrality which exempts from 
taxation, and under the fixed principle of separa- 
tion between Church and State, more than two 
hundred thousand places of worship, valued at 
more than a billion dollars, are maintained by 
the voluntary generosity of their adherents and 
the dedication of commercial gains to ideal ends. 
Still more dramatic — and to many minds Uto- 
pian — is the expansion of the same sense of 
responsibility until it comprehends the religious 
needs of the entire world. The vast enterprise 
of Foreign Missions, in which all Western na- 
tions have their part, has had its most unstinted 
recognition in the United States, and every less 
favored land is now dotted with institutions of 
worship, education and relief, where thousands 
of heroic souls are maintained in their great 
crusade of love and mercy by the voluntary be- 
nevolence of millions of Americans. 

The organization of philanthropy in the 
United States is another impressive witness of 

IOI 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

the American character. State aid for depend- 
ents and defectives has its most conspicuous il- 
lustrations in other lands, but for voluntary 
methods of relief applied to all types of need 
nothing can be compared with the lavishness, 
not to say the prodigality, of American be- 
nevolence. Vast sums of money — the profits 
of commercialism — are dedicated to equally 
vast enterprises for the care of the destitute and 
the prevention of disease; and in less con- 
spicuous though often more self-sacrificing 
ways multitudes of Americans feel the com- 
pulsion of conscience to offer not their money 
only, but themselves, for the service of the less 
fortunate. 

The same testimony is given by the earlier 
history of the higher education in the United 
States. State universities have, it is true, 
become recognized as legitimate objects for 
expenditure through taxation, but the earlier 
group of universities and colleges, established by 
private means and sustained by personal loyalty, 
still commands generous support and perpetu- 
ates the national tradition of large and free be- 
nevolence. Here, then, is a national character 
of a more complex type than that of a com- 
pletely commercialized democracy; a people so 
richly endowed with quickness of conscience, re- 
102 



The American Character 

sponsiveness to need, a large view of social duty, 
and a personal loyalty to God — that, even if 
they have outgrown the severity and simplicity 
of earlier faiths, they still testify to the survival 
of traits which marked those original " Plan- 
tations." 

The same inherent inclination to idealism is 
still exhibited in many of the latest transactions 
and propositions which reveal the heart of the 
American people, and which surprise or con- 
found those who fancy the national character to 
be simply and crudely commercial. " The Open 
Door," secured by American diplomacy to 
China, has led to an international friendship 
which makes America the trusted adviser of a 
new and vast republic. Disinterested candor 
in dealing with Japan has won that proud nation 
to a confidence which even the hysterical animos- 
ity of legislators has not yet been able to destroy. 
Even the politicians of the United States have 
come to realize that a candidate who would win 
popular applause must be — onat least pretend to 
be — a moral idealist, promoting a cause which 
the conscience of the people should support. 
" The square deal," the " appeal to the people," 
the protest against " privilege," or " the money 
power," or " Wall Street," or the " crucifying 
of the nation on a cross of gold," — all these 

103 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

campaign cries of American politics, whether 
shouted by honest reformers or by clever dema- 
gogues, assume that the masses of plain Ameri- 
cans are peculiarly susceptible to moral exhorta- 
tion, and that a cause, even if it be no better than 
personal ambition or sectional animosity, must 
be urged in the language of disinterestedness 
and commended to the conscience of the people. 
Such, then, is the American character — not 
dominated by a single motive, but the battle- 
ground where two motives contend. In the 
struggle for mastery between these two opposing 
impulses the fundamental problem of security 
and permanence for the American Republic is 
revealed. " 111 fares the land," said Goldsmith, 
" to hastening ills a prey, where wealth accum- 
ulates and men decay." If national prosperity 
and the resulting passion for gain must involve 
the decline of those ideal motives which have 
dignified an honorable past, then the United 
States of America will have its day of extrava- 
gant splendor and will then repeat the history of 
other decadent civilizations and crumble at the 
touch of less degenerate, even if more barbaric, 
foes; but if the uncommercialized aims which 
still survive shall become more imperative and 
shall call the soul of the nation to new generosi- 
ties and self-sacrifices commensurate with its 
104 



The American Character 

vast capacities, then the great days of the Amer- 
ican democracy are still to come. 

In this critical situation, whose issue, it must 
be confessed, is not absolutely determined, there 
are at least two considerations which may re- 
assure one's hope. The first is derived from the 
sheer magnitude of the problems which now con- 
front the American democracy. The resources 
of nature, the conquest of a continent, the de- 
velopment of transportation, diversified produc- 
tion, and mechanical invention — all these and 
many other causes have compelled an extension 
of intellectual horizon, a larger range of fore- 
sight, and a deliverance from provincialism. 
The thoughtful American citizen must think of 
his country and of his own place in it, not with a 
localized but with a continental habit of mind. 
His own affairs are inevitably and fundamen- 
tally concerned with distant wheat-fields, or 
trunk-lines of traffic, or international politics. 
His industrial energy must have behind it a 
capacity for vision, a fertile imagination, an in- 
genuity and expectancy, which make him not 
only a doer, but a seer. In other words, the 
very expansion of American commercialism 
quickens the native disposition to idealism. 
The man of business dreams of waving fields 
supplanting arid deserts, and presently his 

105 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

railways and irrigation-plants make the desert 
blossom into farms. The inventor devises an 
instrument which seems to others a mere toy, 
but soon the continent becomes a whispering 
gallery and friend speaks to friend across the 
sea. The nations of Europe are plunged into 
tragic conflict and the United States looks on 
at a struggle with which she is unconcerned, 
until at last it becomes plain that neutrality is 
impracticable in a world so inevitably interde- 
pendent, and the very necessities of national 
commercialism urge the nation to an interna- 
tional idealism. 

The effect thus produced on the Ameri- 
can habit of mind by the magnitude of its 
problems is still further reinforced by observ- 
ing the nature of those problems which are 
now most conspicuous in American life. The 
schemes and controversies which with each 
new year become more insistent have, as a rule, 
the form of industrial or political change, but 
within this legislative or economic form there is 
revealed in each of these agitations an interior 
spirit of ethical passion, a demand for equity, 
fraternity, or compassion, a protest against a 
dehumanized way of life. What is called the 
Labor Movement, for example, exhibits on 
the largest scale this twofold character. In its 
106 



The American Character 

form it is a question of wages, hours, or terms 
of pay, but within this economic form is the 
surging life of a multitude of wage-earners, pro- 
testing by strategy or force against what they 
believe to be inequitable or humiliating. The 
more radical programmes of social revolution 
exhibit in the same way a body and a soul. The 
economics of revolution may be impracticable 
and illusory, but no economic refutation is likely 
to check the revolt. The movement gets its in- 
terior momentum from motives of idealism, 
which may indeed be misdirected, but which can- 
not be diverted from their vision of a world of 
brotherhood and peace. No corrective legisla- 
tion and no economic argument can be conclusive 
to those who have thrown themselves into the 
cause of social revolution, which do not satisfy 
the idealism of revolution with a saner and more 
practicable idealism wrought out of the existing 
conditions of industrial life. 

Considerations like these, though they do 
not exclude the crudities or cruelties of a com- 
mercialized democracy, indicate that the heart 
of the people is still sound, and that even 
the marvellous expansion of American com- 
mercialism has in it the seeds of a worthier 
life. Whatever idealism may survive or flour- 
ish in the future must be attained, not by 

107 



Religious Education of an American Cm, 

retreating from the conditions of American 
civilization, but by trusting and develop- 
ing them. Out of this money-making and ma- 
terialized democracy must emerge the na- 
tional character. The better America cannot 
be detached from the real America, like a 
flower tied to a stick, but must bloom from the 
same dark soil in which commercial success has 
taken root; and there are many signs that the 
plant which has seemed unlovely and even 
poisonous may, through the very forces which 
have conspired for its growth, blossom at last 
into fragrance and beauty. 

The latest and perhaps the finest expression 
of this fundamental note in the American char- 
acter is offered as these words are written. 
After years of patient and long-suffering neu- 
trality the American people are summoned to 
abandon their commercial independence and to 
take their part in a world-war; and in words 
whose eloquence of phrase is matched by their 
depth of feeling the representative of American 
opinion speaks for a united country. " We 
have," he says, " no selfish ends to serve. We 
desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no 
indemnities for ourselves, no material compen- 
sation for the sacrifices we shall freely make. 
We are but one of the champions of the rights 
10S 



The American Character 

of mankind. We shall be satisfied when those 
rights have been made as secure as the faith and 
the freedom of the nations can make them." 
What is this lofty utterance but an epoch-mak- 
ing statement of the essential idealism of the 
American morality? "We doubt," comments 
the leading English journal, " that if in all his- 
tory a great community has ever been sum- 
moned to war on grounds so ideal"; and an- 
other adds, " The lofty dignity of language 
adds to the impressiveness of this international 
idealism." No nation need despair of itself 
when, in the greatest of emergencies, it hears 
such words spoken in its name and with full 
heart welcomes them. Even though it has been 
sorely tempted by the gain of the whole world, 
it has not lost its own soul. The taint of the 
dollar has not poisoned the springs of Ameri- 
can idealism. There is strength and promise 
still in the American character. 



109 



VII 

DISCIPLINE 

If the sphere of American citizenship and the 
nature of the American character have been with 
any degree of accuracy defined, one is led, next, 
to consider the obstacles which confront that 
citizenship and the defects which that character 
is likely to show. The most obvious and threat- 
ening fault of the American character is its lack 
of Discipline. The American child is often 
self-assertive, irrepressible and unrestrained. 
The American youth is apt to be masterful, self- 
important and inconsiderate. The American 
man of business is in an unprecedented degree 
venturesome and self-confident. The American 
citizen applies his untrained mind without self- 
distrust to the profoundest problems of govern- 
ment and his undisciplined will to untried meth- 
ods of reform. A distinguished American has 
said that his country is alone in the world in its 
distrust of experts. One man's opinion is com- 
monly thought to be as good as another's, if not 
no 



Discipline 

better. A citizen may train himself laboriously 
for some form of public service, for diplomacy 
or legislation or the teaching of some branch 
of learning, and may find himself some day 
displaced by a wholly untrained competitor. 
When a candidate is proposed for office the first 
question asked concerning him is likely to be, not, 
" How adequately prepared is he for his task? " 
but, " Is he of our party; can he get the votes? " 
Inexperience may be a passport to preferment, 
and ignorance a title to self-respect. 

With this lack of discipline it is not surprising 
that the American democracy, in spite of vast ex- 
penditures, multiplied legislation, and myriad 
schemes for social service, finds itself unpre- 
pared for any strain of political or commercial 
life. Prosperity has promoted recklessness; 
eagerness to give orders has anticipated willing- 
ness to take orders; audacity has displaced obe- 
dience; and confidence in the future has ignored 
the lessons of the past. Here is a manifest 
peril either for an individual or a nation. No 
country can be safe which commits its highest 
concerns to men whom no judicious business 
firm would trust with the direction of its af- 
fairs. Political wisdom cannot be expected 
from this casual and irresponsible habit of 
mind, which faces the future as though it were 

in 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

a game or a jest. We speak of the lack of 
national preparedness for war, but it demands 
not less time and thought to train a nation for 
the problems of peace and the effective service 
of the common good. 

What, then, is discipline; and how may it be- 
come operative in American life? It is a curi- 
ous fact that the highest authority on the prob- 
lem of religious education, though he gave his 
teaching under circumstances very remote from 
the conditions of to-day, was led to consider this 
very question and to answer it. There came one 
day to Jesus Christ a captain of the Roman 
army. It is probable that the two had never 
met before. Certainly the stranger knew noth- 
ing of the theology and little of the religion 
which Jesus had been teaching to his friends. 
Yet as this Roman captain meets the personality 
of Jesus Christ, he sees in it a leadership which 
commands his loyalty, and the soldier presents 
himself to the teacher as he might to his com- 
manding officer. One can almost see him stand- 
ing there, erect and alert, with his hand lifted in 
salute. When he speaks, it is as a captain to a 
general; and Jesus, as he listens to this man's 
self-confession, hears in it just what he needs 
for his own cause, and welcomes the Roman of- 
ficer as an example for his own disciples. " I 
112 



Discipline 

have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel." 
It must not be inferred from this passing in- 
cident that Jesus was endorsing the profession of 
a soldier or surrendering his message of love to 
the methods of war. The purpose of Jesus was 
much more comprehensive than this approval of 
militarism. It was his habit to seize out of each 
vocation, as it lay before him, the spiritual les- 
son which each had to teach, and to hold up be- 
fore his followers the significance even of the 
least praiseworthy pursuits. Jesus does not 
commend fraud because he tells how an ingen- 
ious steward was wiser than the children of light; 
or defend wealth because he says that a man 
with ten talents gains ten talents more. When 
he says, " Other sheep I have," he is not prais- 
ing sheepishness; when he contrasts sheep with 
goats, he is not making a zoological discrimina- 
tion. All nature and all life are to him sym- 
bols of the Kingdom he has come to found, and 
even those aspects of the world which seem most 
hostile to his mission are drawn by him into its 
service. Even the shrewdness of a dishonest 
servant, even the self-multiplying character of 
money, becomes a parable of the Kingdom. In 
other words, the thought of Jesus is not of the 
parts of life, but of the whole of it; not of one 
kind of experience, but of the whole of experi- 

113 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

ence. In this spirit he meets a soldier. Here 
comes this Roman officer, with the habit of mil- 
itarism wrought into his conduct of life, and in 
that attitude of the soldier Jesus discerns some- 
thing that he needs in his religion, and draws a 
lesson for his disciples from the military ca- 
reer. 

And what was it in this Roman captain 
which received from Jesus so quick and glad a 
welcome? It was his discipline. This soldier, 
as he says of himself, was a man under author- 
ity, having officers over him; and at the same 
time he was a man with authority, having 
soldiers under him. He received orders, and 
he gave orders. He obeyed and he expected 
to be obeyed. He had learned to take or- 
ders, and that gave him the right to command. 
His service in the ranks had given him that pre- 
paredness which now made him a captain. 
That is the difference between a soldier in an 
army and a man in a mob. Each person in the 
mob may be brave, but the mob scatters when 
the soldiers come because the mob is undisci- 
plined. It has not been trained in the instinct 
of obedience, and so it lacks the power of con- 
trol. No sooner, then, does this soldier state 
his military creed than Jesus sees in it the test of 
discipleship. Give me this soldierly discipline, 
114 



Discipline 

he says, where the habit of obedience has cre- 
ated the power of authority, and this discipline 
which prepares for war may be converted into 
a discipline which may create an efficient and 
self-controlled discipleship. 

Such is the principle which Jesus carries over 
from the experience of a soldier into the experi- 
ences of life; and the same principle of discipline 
may be observed in its operations among the va- 
ried interests of the modern world. What, for 
example, is the problem of education? What 
is it to be educated? Why does one devote so 
much time and money to get for himself or his 
children an education? What is left of one's 
education when one has passed from school or 
college to the absorbing vocations of life? 
Much that one has learned — dates, facts, lan- 
guages — has slipped away from one's mind 
like water off a roof. What then remains? 
There remains, if education has been wise, a 
mental habit, a discipline of mind, a capacity to 
attack new problems with confidence, a larger 
view of things, a more comprehensive aim. An 
educated person takes command of new situa- 
tions and novel undertakings, as an officer takes 
command of his troops. And how is it that this 
capacity to command has been developed? 
It is reached through the training to obey. 

ii5 



Religious Education of ax American Citizen 

The educated mind has been taught by greater 
minds and has felt the authority of greater 
thoughts. The laws of nature, the mas- 
ters of literature, the great achievements of sci- 
ence or art, have taught one reverence and loy- 
alty, and that acceptance of intellectual leader- 
ship makes one in his own time a leader. He 
has been a man under authority; and, therefore, 
when his own education comes to be tested he 
becomes a man having authority, to whom less 
educated minds turn as to one who is fit to lead. 
The educated man stands on the shoulders of 
the past and so looks farther into the future. 
He is saved from repeating old mistakes by 
knowing what the past has learned and has had 
to unlearn. He does not have to begin things; 
he is able to start with the momentum of the 
past. 

Sometimes a man proposes to be an intellec- 
tual leader without a scholar's discipline. He 
thinks he has found some short-cut to knowl- 
edge, a miraculous invention, or a remedy for all 
diseases, or a final philosophy. Then his little 
venture sails out on the sea of the world, and 
soon its wreck lies stranded in the bookstores 
or the Patent-Office. This man was confident 
only because he was ignorant. He had not 
listened to the masters of truth, and so he 
116 



Discipline 

thought he was himself one of the masters. 
He had not acquired reverence for the great- 
ness of truth and so he fancied that the 
truth was simple and small. A witty Amer- 
ican once said, " It is easy enough to die for 
an idea if you have but one idea"; but sup- 
pose instead of one idea possessing your mind, 
you realize that many ideas must be combined 
and harmonized, then you need discipline to 
master the complexity of truth. The edu- 
cated mind has submitted itself to the discipline 
of dull and uninteresting drill, and when such 
a mind in its turn is called to originate and pro- 
duce it has intellectual preparedness, and says to 
its obedient thoughts : Go, Come, Do this ; and 
all the forces of intellect and imagination obey. 

Such is the soldierliness of the intellectual 
world, — the willingness to learn wrought into 
the capacity to teach. The same principle rules 
the entire conduct of life. The crises of ex- 
perience arrive for the most part, not logically, 
gradually, or when expected, but with a terrific 
abruptness and an unanticipated demand. Out 
of a clear sky, without a word of warning, like 
a tornado rushing upon a sleeping town, the 
onset of disaster or temptation or sorrow comes, 
and the will calls for reinforcement, as though 
a sudden cry for help broke the quiet of the 

117 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

night. What is it that steadies the will and 
rescues it from panic in these unforeseen and ter- 
rifying experiences which threaten to over- 
whelm one's life? It is the acquisition of an in- 
stinct for the right, which leaps to action as a 
soldier falls into his place at the call to arms, 
or a sailor grasps the right rope when the storm 
strikes. 

And how is this instinct of rightly-directed 
action attained? To expect that it will arrive 
spontaneously and without preparedness is 
precisely as if a country should expect a 
million trained soldiers to spring to arms in 
a day. Self-control, patience, poise, sanity, is 
as much the product of discipline as is the sol- 
dier's efficiency when the crisis of the campaign 
arrives. Moral defeat and panic happen for 
the most part, not because one does not want to 
do right, but because he is not prepared to do 
right at the right time. Sin and sorrow are 
hard enough to face at any time, but what makes 
resistance to them hardest is that they take one 
by surprise. " What we call heroism," Presi- 
dent Lowell has finely said, " the great deed 
of the moment, is the synthesis of life and char- 
acter; and character is what you have been 
doing and thinking all your life." " Watch, 
therefore," says the Master of such experiences, 
118 



Discipline 

" for ye know neither the day nor the hour . . . 
and what I say unto you I say unto all, Watch." 

And how is this discipline to be secured? It 
is the product of a habit of loyalty to ideals 
which cannot be disobeyed. Duty, integrity, 
chastity, honor, truth, self-control, self-sacrifice, 
■ — these are not gifts awaiting acceptance, they 
are powers to be trained; not calculations of 
expediency, or problems for discussion, but im- 
perative laws like the law of gravitation, in 
obedience to which one finds security, upright- 
ness, efficiency, and poise. To the life thus 
prepared there can be no shattering surprises. 
When the storm breaks, when hopes are de- 
feated, when sorrow crushes, when sin allures, 
one does not have to improvise decisions. His 
conscience has learned to obey, and so it is now 
ready to command. It is what the Apostle de- 
scribed as a u good conscience," ready for 
emergencies, sleeping with its weapon at its 
side, a disciplined sentinel on the frontier of life. 

Such, then, is discipline, not alone for soldiers 
whose business it is to kill, but quite as much for 
plain people in the modern world, who have to 
fight their own battles of the mind or heart. 
The teaching of Jesus goes, however, still far- 
ther; for it gathers up all these varied aspects 
of discipline, intellectual and moral, into a gen- 

119 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

eral view of the whole of life as steadied and 
sustained by discipline. Observing this fitness 
to command wrought out of the willingness to 
obey, Jesus sees in this attitude of the soldier to 
his commander the same quality which in re- 
ligion is called Faith. " I have not found so 
great faith," he says, u no, not in Israel." 
What a strange story of misinterpretation and 
complication the word faith recalls ! How 
many Christians have been led to fancy that 
faith is a kind of intellectual consent, the ac- 
ceptance of propositions which the reason may 
doubt or deny! Yet here is a Roman soldier 
who never heard of this kind of faith and who 
could not have repeated a single article of any 
Christian creed, but who comes to Jesus to re- 
ceive orders, and in his turn to give orders; and 
Jesus says to the lookers-on, " This is what I 
mean by faith ! This which this Roman captain 
calls soldierliness is what I want in my disci- 
ples." Faith, in other words, is not intellectual 
conformity or doctrinal confession; still less is 
it the opposite of science or reason. Faith, ac- 
cording to Jesus Christ, is an attitude of the will, 
a habit of mind, an instinct of loyalty, which 
responds to the summons of truth or duty as a 
trained soldier hears the word of command and 
stands at his post; and this discipline of the will. 
120 



Discipline 

this glad and prompt obedience, is what pre- 
pares one for self-command and for command 
of others, when one must either lead or be lost. 

The same teaching is often heard in the Gos- 
pels. Jesus meets one day a woman of Canaan, 
who cries to him, " Have mercy on me; Lord, 
help me "; and Jesus answers her, " O woman, 
great is thy faith." A woman which was a 
sinner comes to him, bringing her offering of 
penitence, and Jesus says, " Thy faith hath 
saved thee; go in peace." Neither these 
women, nor the Roman captain, could have re- 
peated a creed which would have admitted them 
to any of the great churches in Christendom; 
yet all of them were, according to Jesus, saved 
by faith. Faith, that is to say, is not a matter 
of affirmation, but a matter of consecration. It 
is not a form which one holds, but a power 
which holds one. When the i\postle Paul says 
that we walk by faith, he expresses with preci- 
sion the teaching of Jesus. Faith is not a way 
of talking, but a way of walking. It is not a 
problem to answer, but a path to follow. It is 
the habitual loyalty of a disciplined life to a 
loving and living God. 

And that is what gives one command of 
himself and of experience when the tests of 
life arrive. It is a habit of mind which cannot 

121 



Religious Education' of an American* Citizen 

be taken by surprise; the dedication of the will 
not to do one's own will but the will of Him 
that sends one. That is what Jesus means by 
faith. Many truths may still remain unex- 
plored, but the way is plain. " I am the Way,' 1 
says Jesus; and along that way one walks by 
faith; as little aware, perhaps, as the Roman 
captain could have been, that his loyalty may be 
accepted as discipleship ; perhaps not even con- 
fessing Christ as Leader; but taking orders in 
the ranks, and learning thereby to be a captain; 
and at last with a glad surprise hearing the 
Commander say: " I have not found, even 
where w*orship is most devout and creeds are 
most convincing, greater faith than here.' , 



122 



VIII 

POWER 

Next to the need of Discipline in the religious 
education of an American citizen comes the need 
of Power. Discipline is not an end in itself, 
it is a means to efficiency. Willingness to serve 
is accepted because it leads to power to com- 
mand. It is often fancied that the religious life 
is of a powerless, passive, anaemic character; 
and Christian art has done much to perpetuate 
this ideal of a resigned and self-mortifying as- 
ceticism, a Man of Sorrows, a Lamb of God. 
When, however, the first hearers of Jesus re- 
ported their first impression of his teaching, they 
turned with constant reiteration to the word 
Power. Twenty-five times in the first three 
Gospels, and in the most significant connections, 
this word appears. " The multitudes glorified 
God," says Matthew, " which had given such 
power unto men." " The Kingdom of God 
comes with power," says Mark. " His word 
was with power," says Luke. The ministry of 
Jesus was, in other words, dynamic; he spoke as 
one having authority; he had power to lay down 

123 



Religious Education of ax American Citizen 

his life and he had power to take it again. It 
is this quality which most commends Jesus Christ 
to a modern man. The ascetic habit of an in- 
effective saint, the self-centred concern with a 
personal salvation, — this which for thousands 
of the finest natures in the Middle Ages con- 
stituted the way of perfect discipleship, — the 
vita religiosa which could not be attained among 
the ordinary affairs of the working world, — 
cannot hope to command the loyalty of men 
who must work out the problems of their re- 
ligious life in terms of citizenship. What they 
must have is not a willingness to abandon the 
world, but a power to redeem the world; not 
the gift of self-surrender only, but that of self- 
mastery; not a way of retreat, but a way of vic- 
tory; not a leader who is a Lamb, but a leader 
who is a Lion; and they turn with a new con- 
fidence to that dynamic quality in the teaching 
of Jesus which drew his first disciples from their 
boats, their tax-booths, and their homes with the 
irresistible call of spiritual power. 

But what was the secret of this power which 
was felt in the person of Jesus, and how can 
that power be transmitted and utilized by less 
inspired lives? In a passage of the Fourth 
Gospel, which is so penetrating and illuminating 
that it carries the assurance of authenticity, 
124 



Power 

Jesus himself answers this question. " My 
teaching," he says, " is not mine, but His that 
sent me. If any man will do His will, he shall 
know of the teaching, whether it be of God, or 
whether I speak of myself." The secret of his 
power, that is to say, was in its being not his own 
power. His teaching had been committed to 
him as to a messenger or interpreter; and the 
sense of being an instrument of Him that sent 
him gave confidence and conviction to all which 
he had to say. As he had surrendered his will 
to do the will of his Father, he had gained in- 
sight, wisdom, and power of his own. It would 
be the same, he said to his hearers, with any one 
of them. The teaching which was one's own 
would always be hesitating, timid, egotistical, 
unauthoritative. The teaching which con- 
sciously allied itself with the Source of Truth 
and which the teacher felt himself sent to give, 
would have in it confidence, self-effacement, and 
power. Any man who is willing to do, not his 
own will, but the will of Him who sends him, 
will find this dedication of the will transformed 
into authority and force, and may not only do 
the will but come to know the teaching as of 
God and not of himself. 

Such is the Christian doctrine of Power; and 
it may be verified in many experiences and as- 

125 



Religious Education* of an American Citizen 

pects of the modern world. Consider, for ex- 
ample, what happens in the intellectual life. 
One of the most perplexing and chastening dis- 
coveries which people of the academic circle 
sometimes have to make is the discovery of in- 
tellectual power and insight, literary force and 
charm, scientific attainment and fertility, where 
education has been meagre and circumstances 
barren and the privileges of the higher culture 
denied. It is as though a flower of startling 
beauty should spring from a heap of refuse or 
from a narrow crevice in the sterile rock. A 
student at the university, for instance, proposes 
to cultivate his taste in English literature, but 
when he looks for modern models of expression 
he finds, side by side with the academic perfect- 
ness of Newman or Matthew Arnold, of Lowell 
or Emerson, the Gettysburg Address of Lin- 
coln, the Lyrics of Burns, or the Memoirs of 
General Grant. How could it happen that a 
rustic lawyer, or a vagrant singer, or a silent 
fighter, should become a master of the richness 
or rhythm or robustness of the English tongue? 
What does it mean that, in the latter half of 
the seventeenth century, there were in England 
but two great creative minds, and that one of 
these men was for eight years a student at Cam- 
bridge, and the other was a strolling and prof- 
126 



Power 

iig2:e :ir.ke:? '•"•.:. 1.2 :::■: 2r::r.:-:::y 
bis refinement of si r the 

n Carl enun- 

ciation: not to app: nial miracle 

of omniscier.: rmation and unerring touch 

in the butcher's son and strolling playwright, 
Shakespeare ? it be that the uni- 

: : _ ne eirzuen; 

matched by the thrilling appeal of the 
O-aker ::r::::-r:ir.rrr ; : dr. z r.rz.: : Cr ~-der. 
one turns from literature to science or philoso- 
rhy in En^inni i„:.:r zr.e las: eerrzr 
does it me: neithei Spencex : :: 

neit h e: 7 n : r Huxley nor Tyndall, owed 

anything : ; :d;se miversiries ::' ~hi;h ! 
cauiay -:::- :da: Camdridre edzeared :i>d:rs 
:"i I::: : :d :::::: idem ; 

What is :; ; : said :: :dis un discriminating 
distribution of intellectual power? Must it be 
inferred tda: a literal educaticr. is likely :; stlre 
ceni-5 222 :z >:ar iize medltcriry: - 1 . lit- 
tle trlrl in 2 Xe~ Y:rk 5 : ~as 2s^e2 :h = 
quest: cm '* W;.:: is the diferer.ee ter^eer an 
educated man 222 an intelligent n:: : " 222 



r.^s r s :— n trmxs. . lust .: 
::ed :na: the ease 222 freedrm 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

of the academic life, while it may promote edu- 
cation, may diminish intelligence, imparting the 
knowledge of what other people think and sap- 
ping the power to " work one's own thinks "1 
Fortunately for the world no such inference 
can be legitimately derived either from observa- 
tion or from history. The higher education, 
even if it has not been able to convert base 
metals into gold, has refined and disciplined 
great numbers of minds. Nothing could be 
more foolish than any wholesale depreciation 
of academic training as unadapted to modern 
life. Nothing is more obvious than a new de- 
mand for the higher learning among the com- 
plex and baffling problems of the present day. 
No testimony to the worth of such a training is 
so appealing as the regrets of those who had to 
win their way without its aid. 

But the saying of Jesus Christ is concerned 
with a much profounder problem than that of 
the differences between educated and uneducated 
men. It discloses the secret of intellectual 
power in educated and uneducated alike. It 
announces the place of the will in the operations 
of the mind. A system of education is an 
ingenious mechanism for the transmission of 
power. It is a Rapid Transit System, where the 
learning of the world may be expeditiously and 
128 



Power 

safely conveyed to the mind of youth. Its lec- 
ture-halls are power-houses for the generating 
of intellectual momentum; its studies are tracks 
to direct that power; its libraries and labora- 
tories are wires for its transmission. Educa- 
tion, that is to say, utilizes power, economizes it, 
multiplies it, keeps it on the right track, reduces 
its risks. But whence comes the power itself? 
That is not a mechanical creation, but a personal 
inspiration. It is communicated, not by systems 
but by scholars, not by instruction but by con- 
tagion, wherever the will to teach touches with 
its electric spark the will to learn. The mys- 
terious power generated in those personalities 
and those ideals constitutes the real university, 
and without that accumulated dynamic all the 
outward mechanism of transmission is impotent 
and dead. 

It is the same throughout the history of 
the intellectual life. What gives any man his 
vigor of style, his insight into truth, his origi- 
nality in research, is — as Jesus said — the 
dedication of his will to the task which com- 
mands his loyalty, so that he is able to say, 
11 My teaching is not mine, but His that sent 
me." The author, poet, statesman, man of 
science, achieves his best, not because academic 
opportunities have been thrust upon him, nor yet 

129 



Religious Education' of an American Citizen 

because these opportunities have been denied 
him, but because, with or without favoring op- 
portunity, he has made himself an instrument of 
the truth, a priest — as Fichte said that every 
scholar should be — ministering at the altar of 
reality, giving his will to do the Will that sends 
him, and through that self-effacing dedication 
of the will coming to know that the teaching 
is not of himself. In other words, the chief 
obstacle to intellectual efficiency is not lack of 
brains but lack of power, and the secret of in- 
tellectual power is not genius but consecration. 
To attach one's will to a purpose larger than 
oneself, as though the trolley reached out to 
touch the source of momentum, heat and light, 

— that is to get power, either in the university 
or in the world. 

And here one begins to understand that in- 
tellectual atrophy which may be sometimes ob- 
served in academic life, where the power to 
produce has shrivelled into the power to criti- 
cise, and a man who might have been a scholar 
has dwindled into a mere analyst, and become, 

— as Lowell said in his " Cathedral " : 

" Child of an age that lectures, not creates, 
Plastering our swallow-nests on the awful Past, 
And twittering round the works of larger men, 
As we had builded what we but deface." 
130 



Power 

What is the cause of this paralysis of power, 
whose premonitory symptoms are seen in aca- 
demic affectation and cynicism? It is the sign of 
the undetermined will, the lack of a cause to 
serve, the loss of motive, the desire to do one's 
own will rather than the will of Him who sends 
one. " I see our Oxford men," a scholar there 
has said, "afflicted with two defects: the not 
having any opinions, which they call modera- 
tion; and the not expressing their opinions, 
when they have them, which they call the bal- 
anced mind." What makes one's English style 
mincing and affected is self-consciousness, the 
conception of English as an art instead of a 
tool, a pose instead of a power. What makes 
one's decisions limp or his administration weak 
is the touch of self-interest, ambition, or envy, 
tripping up the will and vitiating the judg- 
ment. Such people, though they have much 
learning, have never learned. Their produc- 
tive thought has been sapped by their feebleness 
of will, until at last they end their days lecturing 
and commenting on the works of men who may 
have been far less gifted than they, but who 
have written and taught and discovered what 
was not their own, but was committed to them 
to impart. 

Such, then, for any one, young or old, is the 

131 



Religious Education of ax American Citizen 

secret of intellectual power. Let him get into 
contact with a teacher, a subject, a purpose, an 
ideal, powerful enough to win a self-effacing 
loyalty; and then, as though the transmitting 
wire touched the responsive mind, efficiency, 
love of work, intellectual achievement, is his. 
It is not so much that he has taken hold of his 
task as that his task has taken hold of him. 
He is on the right track, and the work of life 
follows the way which has been discovered by 
the dedication of his will. Nothing is more sur- 
prising as one looks back after many years on 
the men of his own generation than to observe 
how efficiency has been attained by mediocrity 
and accession of power has been given to lives 
which in youth seemed far from extraordinary; 
and on the other hand, how some men who 
seemed at the outset sure of distinction have 
been smitten by intellectual atrophy and have 
never justified the hopes with which they began. 
Talent may fail and obscurity may shine. 
Hard circumstances may through their very 
friction stiffen the will to resistance, and soft 
circumstances may through their very non-resist- 
ance slacken the tension of desire. Just as the 
athlete finds his energies multiplied and his en- 
durance prolonged when he runs not for him- 
self but for his university or his team, so the 
132 



Power 

scholar's mind is quickened as it is applied not 
to do his own will, but the will of Him that sends 
him. He is saved from himself as he serves 
what is better than himself. His service, as the 
English Prayer-book says, becomes his perfect 
freedom. Whenever and wherever one's mind 
gives itself to serve a task which claims more 
than one can give, then, whether it be in the 
university or in the world, one's liberal educa- 
tion begins. 

Such was the teaching of Jesus to the Rabbis 
of Jerusalem, the representatives of that aca- 
demic orthodoxy which has its counterpart in the 
modern world. But like so many sayings of the 
Gospel the principle thus taught to one little 
group of listeners has larger applications. 
That is one of the most characteristic aspects of 
the method of Jesus. His teaching was for the 
occasion, the person, the moment, and the mind 
of the Master seemed fixed on the single soul 
and the immediate need. Yet in that incidental 
occasion the Teacher habitually discerns the 
working of a universal principle ; and in his deal- 
ing with the single case he discloses the opera- 
tion of a general law. So it is here. What is 
true of learning is true of life. The secret of 
power, whether it be intellectual, moral, or 
spiritual, is in attaching one's own life to a 

133 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

source of power, and the utilizing of that dyna- 
mic of the larger Will. Efficiency, insight, pa- 
tience, faith, self-control, are for those who com- 
mit their wills to the will of Him that sends 
them, and who through the doing of that will 
come to know that the teaching is of God and 
not of themselves. 

Take, for example, the common course of 
a moral problem. One is beset — as who is 
not? — by a grave temptation, a moral issue, 
a critical problem of duty, and looks about for 
some reinforcement of power. How shall I 
resist this attack, one asks himself, whether it 
approach by downright assault, or by subtle 
strategy, or by slow and persistent siege? 
Sound instruction I have had, and good ex- 
amples, and a clear understanding of right and 
wrong. These maxims have contributed to 
my moral education and have their place in 
steadying my mind. But now it is a question, 
not of knowing, but of choosing; not of doc- 
trines but of determination; not of ethics but 
of power. What shall make one stand in 
his place and meet the charge? How shall 
one learn to resist, having never learned be- 
fore? In such a crisis of character there is, 
Jesus answers, but one way of safety. It is in 
the reinforcement of the will from the reserves 
134 



Power 

of God. " My strength is not my own," one 
says, " but His that sends me." I am not left, 
like a picket at his post, deserted by a retreating 
column. I am set here in my place within the 
comprehensive purpose of the plan of God, and 
each act of my loyalty, in what seems an awful 
solitude, counts in the great campaign. To 
fight a moral battle which is all one's own is 
to court disaster; but to be sure that a Com- 
mander surveys the field, and that each private 
soldier, each skirmish, perhaps each defeat, is 
a part of the great design, — that steadies one 
in his place and saves one from panic and rout. 
Giving his will to do the will of Him that sends 
him, the lonely watcher on the skirmish-line 
may come at last to know what was the plan of 
the general when he trusted a post of peculiar 
danger to that special soul. 

It is the same with other experiences. A 
life, for instance, has been smitten by some blow 
of fate, by physical infirmity, it may be, or by 
commercial disaster, or by domestic tragedy. 
What is there so appropriate to such an experi- 
ence as a creed of despondency or despair? 
Why should not one curse God and die ? What 
does it mean, then, that when we meet this kind 
of life, which seems to have been stripped of 
all resources of cheerfulness and hope, it turns 

135 



Religious Education of ax American Citizen 

out so often to be blessed with a peculiar gift 
of cheerfulness, assurance, and power? How 
hath this man endurance, having so much to 
endure? How hath this woman serenity, hav- 
ing suffered so much? And stranger still, how 
does it happen that these very people who are 
bravely bearing their own burdens are precisely 
those who have committed to them the task — 
or rather, as they would call it, the added priv- 
ilege — of bearing the burdens of other lives? 
The secret of these profound experiences is in 
the same law of life which insures both intel- 
lectual achievement and moral strength. The 
riddle of fate, the strain of care, the tragedy of 
sorrow, like the problems of thought and of 
conscience, become interpreted with serenity 
and confidence only as one is able to say: My 
life is not my own, but His that sends me. Hu- 
man experience remains forever baffling and 
meaningless, an infant crying in the night, the 
tale of an idiot, full of sound and fury, signify- 
ing nothing, until it is lifted into this conscious- 
ness of a higher Will whose purpose calls for 
loyalty and whose service is perfect freedom. 
It is difficult to think of anything in these 
tragic days without coming at last upon the 
solemn lessons of the war; and nothing has been 
more impressive in these awful years than to 

136 



Power 

observe the evolution of spiritual power which 
has occurred in millions of lives. Cruelty, bar- 
barism, and incredible ruthlessness, have indeed 
been witnessed, but along with all this an amaz- 
ing elevation of character has been everywhere 
attained. Old and young, men and women, rich 
and poor alike, have discovered in themselves a 
capacity for heroism and self-sacrifice, and a 
tranquil acceptance of sorrow, which would once 
have seemed even to themselves quite unim- 
aginable, but which the new demand has made 
the normal way of life. " Countless thou- 
sands," a visitor at the Front has reported, 
" who had been infected with the poison of 
self-seeking, have learned that there are greater 
things in the world than riches and self-in- 
dulgence, and that happiness is found in active 
service of a great Cause." The frivolous 
temper which once seemed to dominate France, 
the partisan divisions which once seemed to 
threaten England, have been simply submerged 
by this vast wave of passionate devotion. 
" These are great days," one letter says, " in 
which to live in England." " It is a new 
France," another writes, " in which one is per- 
mitted to live." A young Russian student with 
eyes afire says, " The spiritual unity of Rus- 
sia is the great gift of the war." 

137 



Religious Education OP an American Citizen 

What is it that has wrought this spiritual 
good out of so devastating a calamity? 1 
can it happen that a physical tragedy can 
lift people to such heights of moral power? 
It is because they have been delivered from 
themselves, from light-mindedness, from money- 
making, from divisive interests, so that these 
concerns which once seemed commanding have 
shrivelled into insignificance as the new call is 
heard. Many a man in the trenches has found 
a new sense of reality in prayer and a sacra- 
mental experience in suffering which have fed 
him with the bread and water of life. Many 
a woman is going her way with uplifted face 
and unveiled eyes, offering a broken heart as 
one more free gift to the greater purpose, 
as though her private sorrow were a widow's 
mite thrown into the treasury of a suffering 
world. How is it that these millions have 
learned fortitude, patience, and peace, having 
never learned these things before? It is be- 
cause they have discovered at last that for which 
it is worth while to live and to die. What their 
own wills most desired may have been tragically 
denied, but their loyalty to the higher Will has 
taught them the privilege of sacrifice and the 
freedom of service. If any man, even in these 
awful days, is without reservation committed to 

138 



Power 

do the will of Him that sends him, he finds a 
new and unsuspected sense of power flooding 
into his life, and his own will is steadied, chas- 
tened, and cleansed. 

Such is the miraculous way in which tragedy 
has taken us by the hand and led us to the 
truth. For this which war is teaching is noth- 
ing else than that which Jesus taught of the 
whole of life; and what we ought to have 
learned among the problems of peace is forced 
upon us by the stern schooling of war. This 
habit of mind, this steadying of will, this at- 
titude of preparedness, this submergence of 
private aims in the rising tide of sacrifice, — 
this which has become now a natural way of 
life, — this is just the way one ought to be liv- 
ing all the time. This is the way of a religious 
education, — an emancipation from the tran- 
sient and insignificant, and an association with 
the permanent. Personal religion, that is to 
say, begins, not in a creed, not in a form, not 
even in a perfect character, but in that clari- 
fication of thought, and amplification of duty, 
and purification of desire, w T hich can issue from 
nothing less than the consecration of the will. 
The only atheism w T hich one has to fear, in 
this or in any age, is the paralysis of the will, 
the surrender to circumstances, the loss of spirit- 

139 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

ual momentum, as though one were a rudder- 
less derelict on the ocean of time, with no port 
of one's own to reach and drifting straight 
across the track of other lives. The faith that 
saves, in America as in Judea, is that which 
first of all saves one from oneself, and com- 
mits his will to do the will of Him that sends 
him. That does not mean a refuge from the 
vicissitudes of life, as though one had reached 
a harbor where no storm can come; but it 
means at least this: that across the deeps 
of experience w T hich must be traversed, and 
through the storms which are sure to come, one 
has a course to steer, a port to reach, and is 
set at his post to keep his rudder true. 



140 



IX 

PERSPECTIVE 

The third mark of an American citizen who is 
on the way to a religious education is a quick- 
ened sense of spiritual perspective, a capacity 
to set things in their true proportion, to keep 
the great things great and the small things 
small. Without discipline character is unre- 
strained; without power it is impotent; but 
without the sense of proportion it is blunder- 
ing, misguided, intolerant, or blind. The proc- 
ess of religious education begins with self-dis- 
cipline, and through that discipline reaches an 
accession of power; but from that power and 
restraint there should issue a habit of discrimi- 
nation, a just estimate of spiritual values, an ap- 
plication of this disciplined power to ends that 
deserve the loyalty of life. The Apostle Paul, 
writing to his young friend Timothy about the 
Christian life, tells him that one mark of a 
good workman, an " operarius non erubes- 
cendus," is that he " rightly divides " the word 
of Truth. He sees things, that is to say, just 

141 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

as they are; he " cuts a straight road," as the 
Greek says, through reality. The workman 
who gets entangled in the thicket of his task 
ought to blush for his confusion. The work- 
man who can find his way through his task, 
rightly divide its details, and adjust them in a 
comprehensive plan is, the Apostle says, " ap- 
proved unto God." 

Many a well-intentioned and scrupulous life 
fails of intellectual or moral efficiency through 
this lack of perspective. It is like a Chinese 
artist who in painting a plate makes the house 
smaller than the man who is to enter it, and 
the man in his turn larger than the bridge he is 
about to cross. Chinese perspective may be 
picturesque or decorative, but it does not seem 
to Western minds to divide rightly the elements 
in the picture. It is the same with life. Some 
features of its total scene may be over-magni- 
fied, and some over-depreciated, and the total 
result may be unreality or confusion or mere 
blur. 

Consider, for instance, the discriminations 
of theology. Why is it that so many thought- 
ful people in the modern world find themselves 
unable to repeat with complete conviction the 
creeds and confessions which the theologians 
have so laboriously framed? Is it because 
142 



Perspective 

these statements of doctrine, which express the 
profoundest thoughts of many wise and pious 
men, have proved wholly indefensible or false? 
On the contrary, there are many indestructible 
truths about God and man which are formulated 
in the creeds of the Church; and either they or 
some substitute for them is essential to the 
satisfaction of any serious mind. No proposal 
of a mock-liberalism is more futile than the pro- 
posal to abolish creeds. Every reasoning be- 
ing has a creed, if it be only the creed that all 
creeds are unreasonable. The only distinction 
which can be made is between a good creed and 
a bad one, between a rational religion and a 
magical religion. The satisfaction of the mind 
concerning the mysteries of the universe is as 
irresistible a demand for the intelligence as the 
satisfaction of hunger is for the body. To de- 
nounce one creed is to announce another; and to 
profess no creed is to confess that one has given 
up thinking. 

When, however, one recalls these statements 
of Christian doctrine, is he not likely to observe 
in them something of that lack of proportion 
of which Paul wrote to Timothy? Proposi- 
tions which have lost their' significance for 
modern minds may seem to be given the same 
authority and weight as the sublimest affirma- 

143 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

tions of eternal realities. Controversies which 
divided the Church of the third century may 
be set in the foreground of belief for the 
twentieth century. To believe in God the 
Father, Maker of Heaven and Earth, may 
seem to commit one to less verifiable statements 
concerning the resurrection of the body or the 
birth of Jesus Christ or his descent to the dead. 
The wrong division of the word of truth may, 
as Paul said, " overthrow the faith of some." 
To reject a part may seem to involve abandon- 
ing the whole, and because the thought of the 
third century cannot be revivified the Christian 
religion itself may seem a failure. 

It is the same with much modern teaching. 
The divisions now maintained in the Church 
of Christ are, for the most part, not concerned 
with the spiritual problems of religious experi- 
ence, but with the intellectual controversies of 
rival sects. How one should define Christ may 
seem more vital than how one should follow 
him. How the Bible is inspired may seem a 
more central question than whether the Bible in- 
spires us. How one should be baptized with 
water may be a more absorbing question than 
whether one is baptized with the Holy Ghost 
and with fire. By what human hands one has 
been ordained may seem more important than 
144 



Perspective 

whether one is ordained of God. A workman 
who has devoted his piety and learning to these 
scaffoldings of faith should blush, not because he 
has done his work badly, but because he 
has not discriminated between the scaffolding 
and the building, the form and the fact. There 
may be truth in all that he teaches, but it is not a 
" rightly divided " truth. Each part may be 
real, but the proportion of parts may be mis- 
taken. The first business of the Christian the- 
ologian, therefore, is to put truths in their 
places; to make the great things great, and the 
small things small; to fix the mind of the 
Church on central themes; to set what is sure 
in the foreground and what is debatable in the 
background; to group creeds round character, 
sects round a Savior, speculations round con- 
secration, and at the focus of the picture of life 
the soul of man sustained by the Spirit of God. 
That is good theological perspective — a right 
division of the word of Truth. 

This principle of perspective, however, is not 
for theologians only to take to heart. The 
same teaching has its place in the ordinary and 
personal problems of conduct and decision, of 
duty and desire. For when one considers the 
moral blunders and disasters which happen 
among decent people, he cannot help observing 

145 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

that they occur, for the most part, not because 
wrong is consciously preferred to right, but be- 
cause the proportions of right conduct are con- 
fused or blurred. The duty which is remote 
or imaginary may crowd out the duty which is 
immediate and supreme; until what might be 
right in the right place becomes wrong in its 
relation to the whole of life, and the total re- 
sult is distortion or perplexity or despair. 

A conscientious young man or woman, for 
example, may see plainly the heroism of mis- 
sionary service, but may be blind to the prosaic 
occupations of a dependent home; a man of 
business may devise an admirable scheme of wel- 
fare for his employees, but may be indifferent to 
the conditions under which that wealth is created 
which he so generously divides; a conscientious 
citizen may be soft-hearted to public charities 
and hard to live with at home. Even a sin- 
cerely religious life, dedicated to the will of 
God, may be so preoccupied with eternity as 
to be a selfish neighbor or an irritable and 
anaemic saint. 

In another of the letters to Timothy the 
Apostle Paul prays that his young friend may 
have " a good conscience "; and one might be 
led to ask: How can my conscience be bad? 
What can be better than conscientiousness? If 
146 



Perspective 

one obeys his conscience, is he not sure to do 
right? On the contrary, answers the Apostle, 
an undisciplined conscience with a moral deci- 
sion to make may be as dangerous as an undis- 
ciplined soldier with a loaded gun. A con- 
science uninstructed may be as misleading as a 
conscience disobeyed. The will, like the mind, 
is not given ready-made, but given to be made 
ready. A bad conscience may be as dangerous 
as a bad man. History is strewn with the mis- 
takes of conscientious people, who have been 
all the more persistent in their blundering be- 
cause they were quite sure that they were doing 
right. Here is the pathos of many a sanguine 
adventure in social regeneration and of many 
a panacea for social ills. Such an undertaking 
may be prodigal in good intentions and con- 
scientious in aim, so that its failure may leave 
behind it a sense of bewilderment that wrong 
can be so much stronger than right. Yet all 
the while the fatal defect was in bad perspective. 
One scheme or dream was set in the foreground 
of reform, and crowded out other motives and 
aims which were quite as legitimate and essen- 
tial. And so it happens that temperance reform 
may be intemperate, and the brotherhood of 
labor may be unfraternal, and the crusade of 
women may be unwomanly, and the peace 

147 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

party may be belligerent, and religion itself 
may be bigoted or provincial or even cruel. 

At this point one is again confronted by the 
solemn teaching of these years of war. For 
among the many causes of the vast calamity, — 
political, diplomatic, industrial, and moral, — 
none is more unmistakable than the dispropor- 
tionate pace of progress in which the modern 
world has been involved; the uneven step in 
which material and spiritual events have 
marched. On the one hand are the achieve- 
ments of science, of wealth, of industrial or- 
ganization and of centralized control, offering 
themselves with unprecedented abundance and 
efficiency for the service of man; while on the 
other hand may be observed a slackening of 
moral fibre, a loss of spiritual momentum, a 
contempt of moral idealism. The things which 
are external, material, and commercial have 
accumulated beyond all precedent; while the 
things which are spiritual and ethical have 
been ignored or despised. To what, then, 
could this uneven pace of progress lead but to 
calamity? The greater the advance of tech- 
nical achievement, the more terribly it could be 
applied to destruction. As science grew more 
inventive, its consequences grew more horrible. 
Unprecedented material gain coinciding with 
148 



Perspective 

decreasing moral restraint could have no other 
end but tragedy. Civilization had become dis- 
torted and diseased. The more men knew or 
had, the more of other men they could kill. 
The workmen in statesmanship or militarism 
who should be most proud of the structure they 
were building became workmen who needed 
most to blush because they had not rightly di- 
vided the truth committed to their care. 

There remains an opposite aspect of this 
doctrine of perspective which brings it closer to 
one's personal affairs. Instead of overmagni- 
fying the remote and overlooking the near, the 
view may be reversed and the near may crowd 
out the far. Instead of surveying the world as 
through a telescope and seeing only the stars, 
one may hold his hand before his face and shut 
out the light. This is that subtle temptation 
which besets the discouraged, the introspective, 
or the saddened life, where the near approach 
of anxiety or sorrow eclipses the light beyond. 
Disappointment invades one's experience, fail- 
ure embitters, solitude crushes, and in this dark- 
ness of the soul the universe itself seems black, 
and the easy faith of sunny days tragically 
false. " Behold and see," cries the darkened 
soul, " if there be any sorrow like unto my sor- 
row." The sense of proportion becomes lost, 

149 



Religious Education of an American Cm; 

the perspective of life becomes distorted; and 
the problem which confronts one — a solemn 
and tragic problem — is to readjust these per- 
sonal incidents in their larger relationships, to 
restore the balance of things, to regain poise of 
judgment, to set the great things in the centre 
of interest and the little events of one's personal 
affairs in their true perspective. 

And this, again, is one of the many lessons 
which the world may learn through the solemn 
teachings of these days of war. Overwhelming 
and irremediable as is this vast calamity, it 
seems not improbable that there may emerge 
from it at least a new sense of proportion among 
those things for which it is worth while to live 
or to die. In the ordinary course of events it 
may be hard to believe that anything is more 
important than one's own disappointments, sor- 
rows or fears. The whole system of things 
seems to revolve round one's own concerns, 
as the ancients thought the sun moved round 
the world. When, however, in the mysterious 
providence of God, a vast catastrophe forces 
upon one the larger view, each single experi- 
ence finds itself sw r ung into its orbit round 
the larger centre. The great ends of life — 
honor, justice, sacrifice, faith, — open before 
whole nations in a hitherto undreamt-of magni- 
150 



Perspective 

tude, and many a problem which one had thrust 
into the foreground of his thought takes its 
place in the obscure background of desire. 
Divisions of Christian sects, controversies of 
Christian theology, animosities of race or re- 
ligion, prejudices of social classes, — these hot 
debates and burning issues which have seemed 
supremely critical, are at last seen just as they 
are, not as unreal, but as altogether subordi- 
nate to the great ideals which persuade and en- 
noble the higher life of man. " I cannot shake 
off the conviction," an American prophet has 
lately said, " that in this world-shaking war 
God is sifting out the true from the false Chris- 
tianity. ... It is being forced home upon the 
reasons and consciousnesses of men to-day that 
a primarily theological Christianity, a primarily 
emotional mystical Christianity, a primarily 
ceremonial Christianity, a Christianity which 
adopts God as a kind of national perquisite, 
and an Old Testament kind of Christianity — 
have all alike failed to stand the test of these 
crucial days." * 

This is the secret of that wonderful sense 
of spiritual enlargement and emancipation 
which is in these years being attained by 

1 H. C. King, Fundamental Problems, Macmillan, 1907, p. 
240. 

151 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

many a soldier at the Front. Men who are 
face to face every hour with eternity are not 
likely to return from these solemn realities of 
war and to care very much for the wranglings 
of Christian creeds, or the distinctions of Chris- 
tian rituals, or the differences among Chris- 
tian sects, which may have once seemed of 
momentous interest. Three years ago, for 
example, the Church of England seemed al- 
most threatened by disruption because a mis- 
sionary bishop in Africa had partaken of the 
Lord's Supper with other missionaries on whom 
a bishop's hands had not been laid. It is 
difficult to imagine that at the end of the war 
there should be any revival of interest in a 
controversy like this. Important as it may 
still appear to some belated ecclesiastics, the 
world which shall survive the war will be think- 
ing of greater things. As the supreme ends 
of life have been revealed, its minor issues are 
seen in a true perspective; and the teacher who 
shall interpret that new world must rearrange 
reality, redistribute emphasis, and divide in 
more just proportions the word of truth. 
" The world," an English observer concludes, 
" that will emerge will be a world that will be 
new and strange. ... It will be a profoundly 
serious world. . . . We shall be concerned not 
152 



Perspective 

about the decorations of life, but about the 
foundations. Men who have seen the very 
skeleton of civilization face to face . . . will 
come back with a new light in the mind and a 
sense of authority that they never had be- 
fore." * 

To this testimony of a looker-on may be 
added the still more appealing witness of that 
gallant " Student in Arms " who had hardly 
uttered his new faith when he was struck 
down in battle. Writing of his comrades, with 
all their varied traditions and limitations, often 
rough-tongued and undevout, Donald Hankey, 
in the very presence of his own cross and pass- 
ion, said: " Of the Church in which I believe 
they are members, whether they know it or not. 
. . . If these were not good, the Student is a 
blasphemer. He believes in the Holy Catholic 
Church invisible, wherein is and shall be gath- 
ered up * all we have hoped and dreamed of 
good.' He also calls himself an English 
Churchman. But he will never be satisfied 
until the Church of England is the church of all 
good men and women in England, and until all 
the good thoughts and deeds in England are laid 
at the feet of the Lord of all good life." 2 

1 A. G. Gardiner, The War-Lords, Dent, 1915, p. 94. 

2 A Sudent in Arms, Dutton, 1917, p. 216. 

153 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

And if these sad times thus set in the fore- 
ground of thought the great ideals of religion, 
may they not, with the same firm touch, put in 
their proper place the disasters and distresses 
of one's own affairs? Why exaggerate the pro- 
portions of one's experiences? "Why so hot, 
little man? " said Emerson. The very dimen- 
sions of the world-calamity set one's own 
troubles in the background of life. How shall 
one repine or weep when tragedies beyond his 
imagination are devastating millions of hearts 
and homes? Shall he not restrain his own sor- 
row and give himself to the worthier task of 
saving others from the wreck of the world? 
Shall he not sanctify himself anew for others' 
sakes? Is not the strange paradox of the 
Christian life again fulfilled, and one's own 
burden borne the better by adding to it one's 
share in the colossal burden of the time? 

This, then, is what it means to have spiritual 
perspective; to be, as the Apostle Paul said, a 
workman who has no need to blush; to divide 
in right proportion the word of truth. And 
what is the secret of this good workmanship, 
this art of life? How does it happen that one 
may attain this self-control and self-subordina- 
tion, which enables one to see things as they 
really are? The Apostle Paul, in the same 
154 



Perspective 

passage, answers that question. He bids the 
workman at the task of life study to show him- 
self " approved unto God." In other words, 
the secret of good work is that one is not work- 
ing for himself, or on work for which the praise 
is sought by him. He is not his own master, 
but God's workman; and each day he submits 
his work to God's approval. He takes his own 
little life, that is to say, with its problems and 
perplexities, its successes and disasters, and 
holds it up in the light of the Eternal Purpose, 
to see it as a part of the universal plan. Then 
things fall into their places; one sees them as 
they are, not as in themselves central and final, 
but as contributory to the larger aim, wrought 
into the structure of a design which the work- 
man may not wholly understand, but in which 
he is permitted to share. His own work may 
seem fearfully incomplete, but it is done as 
ever in the great Task-Master's eye," and the 
Master puts it in its place within the larger plan 
where it fits in as into a puzzle-picture of the 
experience of life. 

That is religion, — the habitual consciousness 
of a real, even though a very humble, part in 
the purpose which God has for His world. 
One is not a drifting atom in a purposeless uni- 
verse, but held in the cosmic order of moral 

*55 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

as of physical law. And that is the secret of 
courage and self-control. One's life is for one- 
self to build, but the plan of it is given him, and 
the test of it is to approve it to the Designer. 
Ambition is converted into loyalty, and insuf- 
ficiency is lifted into power, and imperfect 
knowledge is sustained by the sense of pro- 
portion and reality in one's task. It is — to 
turn once more to the teaching of the war — 
as though a soldier were doing his " bit " in 
the great campaign, while back of the fighting- 
line stood the Commander where He could sur- 
vey the entire field. Each man is set at his 
own post, not because it is safe there, nor yet 
because it is a post of distinction, but simply 
because that is the place where the General 
has determined that a special work must be 
well done. That is what keeps the soldier 
firm when the strain arrives, and calm when 
things go hard. He is not a solitary sentinel 
left to guard a deserted post; he is just where 
he is needed, and where, if he be a coward, the 
enemy may break through. He is not expect- 
ing that the great victory shall occur just where 
he happens to be; he wants the Commander's 
plan as a whole to succeed; and if his own little 
skirmish is manfully fought, and he holds fast 
to his own trench, — ignorant, it may be, of the 

i 5 6 



Perspective 

greater movement farther down the line, — the 
time may come when he shall at last stand be- 
fore the General, and look without a blush into 
his Commander's face, and be approved of 
Him. 



157 



THE EXPANSION' OF RELIGION 

The religious education of an American citizen 
is promoted by each conscientious home, each 
experience in college or in the world which for- 
tifies moral idealism, each disclosure of the 
American character, and each personal acquisi- 
tion of spiritual discipline, power, and perspec- 
tive. These successive aspects of an enlarg- 
ing experience bring one, however, into view of 
an enlarged conception of religion itself, an ex- 
pansion of religion beyond the limits of all 
segregated or specialized types, and covering 
the entire area of human experience and need. 
A college teacher received some years ago on 
almost the same day two letters, which at first 
reading appeared to deal with totally different 
subjects, but of which the second letter seemed, 
on reflection, a kind of answer to the first. The 
first letter represented that alarming habit of 
young Americans, in school or college, who in 
the course of preparation for some academic 
duty — a debate, it may be, or an essav, or 

i 5 8 



The Expansion' of Religion 

what is sometimes in educational circles called 
with playful exaggeration, an " original re- 
search M — send letters of inquiry to many busy 
people, tabulate the replies, and present the 
result as their own production, when in reality 
it is the work of their innocent victims. This 
ingenuous youth propounded the following 
question, which he had no doubt asked of many 
teachers elsewhere: " How many Christians in 
your University go into athletics? " 

What did he have in mind in this inquiry? 
Did he wish to know how many young men 
played their games honorably and generously, 
so that Jesus, looking upon them as he once 
looked on a young man, would love them? On 
the contrary, the context of the letter indicated 
that what the writer had in mind was not an in- 
quiry into the character of student-life, but a 
technical and ecclesiastical question, concerned 
with a region of experience set apart from ordi- 
nary affairs. It was as if he had inquired how 
many Baptists owned automobiles ; or how many 
Democrats went to the ball-game. The Chris- 
tian life seemed to him to occupy one area of 
life, and the athletic life another; so that one 
might come out of the first and " go into " the 
second. It was as though one were travelling 
on a vestibuled train, where one stepped over an 

159 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

intervening space and passed from the Christian 
life to the athletic life, as one might sleep in one 
car and eat in another. 

The second letter was from quite another 
type of correspondent, a mature and thoughtful 
man, who wrote to deplore what he called the 
provincialism of Christianity. He was im- 
pressed by the meagre use made of the great 
heritage of faith, the segregation of the Chris- 
tion religion within a limited province of the 
spiritual world. Provincialism is a familiar 
social fault. One finds himself some day in 
a little village and listens to the talk of the 
town, — of crops and rains and roads, of 
neighborly gossip and village politics; and one 
says to himself: "These are very interesting 
questions, but how provincial they are ! Why 
does one hear nothing of the great affairs of 
modern life, its national duties and international 
perils, the wars of nations and of industry, the 
aims of literature and art, the ideals of society 
and religion? These larger interests of the 
world come surging up against this little self- 
centred community like waves breaking upon a 
beach, and ebb as they rise without visible im- 
pression on its shallow shore, or at the most 
only touching it with a dash of spray." 

Thus the second letter proved to be a kind of 
1 60 



The Expansion of Religion 

answer to the first. What was it which made 
the inquiry about religion and athletics unprofit- 
able and discouraging? It was its provincial- 
ism. The youth had been led to believe that 
religion occupied a corner of life, where the spe- 
cial interests of church or creed, the local gossip 
of sect or form, might satisfy the minds of its 
disciples. He fancied that there was a wall be- 
tween the religious life and the athletic life, and 
a door through which one might pass from the 
one and " go into " the other. He had set re- 
ligion apart from life, when it was given him to 
be put into life. He had identified religion 
with ecclesiastical mechanics, when religion is, 
in fact, a form of spiritual dynamics. He had 
not realized that the Christian life, instead of 
being an alternative to athletics, is itself an ath- 
letic life. When the Apostle Paul describes the 
Christian character he uses the language of ath- 
letics. " I keep under my body," he says, " so 
fight I, not as one that beateth the air "; " So 
run that ye may obtain "; "I have finished my 
course; I have fought a good fight." That is 
at once the Christian doctrine of the athletic life, 
and the athletic doctrine of the Christian life. 
The Christian does not go into athletics. He is 
already fighting a good fight; running a straight 
race; wrestling against wickedness in high 

161 



Religious Education op an American Citizen 

places. When the Catholic saint, Ignatius 
Loyola, compiled his book of prayers, he called 
them " Spiritual Exercises." They were the 
athletics of the soul. The Christian does not 
neglect his body for the sake of his soul; he does 
not " come out " of his faith when he " goes 
into" a game. His character is consistent; 
that is, it stands together. It is one life that he 
offers to God, his muscle with his mind, his 
sport with his soul. 

When one turns to the New Testament he ob- 
serves that precisely this contrast between a pro- 
vincial and a cosmopolitan religion gave its 
characteristic note to the teaching of Jesus 
Christ. The Scribes and Pharisees had set 
their religion in a province of its own, in the 
synagogues and Rabbinical Schools, with their 
prescribed duties of ritual and ceremonial law. 
Jesus opened a door from these restrictions of 
faith into the fresh air of nature, home, work, 
and play. " Ye tithe mint and anise," he said, 
" and have omitted the weightier matters of 
the law, judgment, mercy and faith." " Ye 
hold fast the tradition of men, as the washing 
of pots and cups . . . making the word of 
God void through your tradition." To give 
religion room to breathe, to abolish the dis- 
tinction between secular and sacred, to sanctify 
162 



The Expansion of Religion 

the whole of life, to welcome the Samaritan who 
stoops to serve and to condemn the Levite who 
passes by on the other side, to proclaim a uni- 
versal Kingdom whose priests are the peace- 
makers and the pure in heart, — that was the 
offence of Jesus which made the leaders of his 
people cry: " Crucify him, crucify him; he 
stirreth up the people. And their voices pre- 
vailed." 

When one proceeds from the Gospels to 
the Letters of Paul, he finds the same teach- 
ing even more specifically given. Writing, for 
instance, to the little company of his fellow- 
disciples in the great metropolis of Corinth, an 
obscure congregation of humble folk in a centre 
of Greek culture and commerce, he does not say 
to them : " Beware, my friends, of Corinth, — 
its wealth and luxury, its superstition and 
worldliness; keep yourselves apart from this 
heathen world." On the contrary, he proposes 
to that little company of Christians the more 
heroic task of winning Corinth itself to their 
cause. " All things," he says, " are yours, — 
the whole busy life which surrounds you, its 
trade, its philosophy, its art, its business, its 
games, — all this is yours, to be possessed and 
redeemed by the cleansing power of the new 
faith." The problem of the Christian was not 

163 



Religious Education of an American Crna 

to be saved from Corinth, but to save Corinth 
itself. 

Nor does the Apostle state this truth in gen- 
eral terms alone. He proceeds to enumerate 
many details in which the expansion of religion 
may be fulfilled. He observes, first, the di- 
visions which had already begun to appear 
among the Christians themselves. Some said 
they were of Paul, some had joined themselves 
to Apollos, some were followers of Cephas. 
It was the beginning of sectarianism; the defini- 
tion of Christianity under some special type of 
doctrine or form. What does the Apostle say 
of this primitive sectarianism? How shall the 
Christian regard these conflicting sects? They 
are all yours, answers Paul, whether of Paul, or 
Apollos, or Cephas. The sects, in other words, 
are cross-sections of the Church, which like 
cross-sections of a tree may represent truth hori- 
zontally, but give no picture of its longitudinal 
growth. You cut a tree across, and each cut 
shows by its rings and fibre the character and 
age of the tree; but no cross-section shows the 
entire tree with its expanding roots and its wav- 
ing branches. It is the same with the sects. 
Each is a section of the whole, but each is a 
cross-section. To cut a tree across is to cut it 
down. To grow and outgrow and grow to- 
164 



The Expansion of Religion 

ward the light is the nature alike of a living 
tree and of a living Church. All sects are 
yours, says Paul to his brethren; yours is not 
a provincial but a cosmopolitan faith; yours is 
the great confession : I believe in the Holy Cath- 
olic Church. Do not confuse catholicity with 
conformity. The province of the Christian 
Church is the whole of life. The Kingdom of 
God, said Jesus, is like a great tree, and in the 
shadow of that comprehensive and expanding 
growth all weary souls may rest. 

Nor does the Apostle limit himself to this 
teaching of an expanding Church. Beyond the 
sects of Christians he sees the tumultuous life 
of the world, with its business, its luxury, its 
work, its wealth, its poverty. The world, Paul 
says to his friends, is yours, — yours to inter- 
pret, to cleanse, and to save. There are, in 
short, two ways in which the Christian may con- 
duct himself toward the world. One is the way 
of retreat. The world is bad and the saint 
must run away. This is the view of life which 
peopled the deserts with hermits and monks, 
and drove the choicest souls of the Middle Ages 
to find refuge from the world. 

" Lust of the world and pride of life, 
They left it all behind, 
And hurried, torn with inward strife, 
The wilderness to find." 

165 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

But did this retreat from the world solve the 
problem of duty? On the contrary, it surren- 
dered its duty, and left the world to be redeemed 
by less competent lives. It was magniiicent, but 
it was not war. The other way, then, to deal 
with the world is to accept it as the appropriate 
sphere for a gallant Christian life, and instead 
of saving oneself out of the world to set oneself 
to save the world. The world is yours, says 
the Apostle. If you are not master of your 
world, then you are either a refugee from it or 
a slave in it. 

Nor is it the world alone which is the prov- 
ince of the Christian. Life, Paul goes on to 
say, is yours; that interior world of mind and 
will, of temptations and ideals, w r hich make of 
the most prosaic experience a drama, a battle, or 
a tragedy. As one passes a throng of people on 
the street, it is startling to reflect what conflicts, 
what adventures, what disasters, their appar- 
ently undramatic lives represent; and there are 
those who teach that one is helpless in the hands 
of these circumstances, and must be w T hat his 
conditions make him. A girl is poor, so she 
has to sin; a man is involved in business, so he 
has to cheat; a home is quarrelsome, so it must 
be shattered by divorce. All this, says die" 
Apostle Paul, is the provincialism of philoso- 
166 



The Expansion of Religion 

phy. We are not the slaves of life, but its mas- 
ters. Circumstances, indeed, modify character; 
but character may turn on its circumstances and 
make of them what it will. One is not a pup- 
pet, a pawn, a cog in the wheels of life; he is a 
creator, a laborer together with God, a par- 
taker of the Divine nature. The province of 
his religion is the whole of his life. And death, 
adds Paul, its perennial enigma, its desolating 
solitude, — this too is yours. If the world and 
life have been yours, if you have had a religion 
which takes command of circumstances, then 
death also is yours, and you may repeat the 
Apostle's song of praise, " Thanks be to God 
which giveth us the victory." 

Finally, proceeds this summary of disciple- 
ship, things present and things to come are 
yours. A rational view both of the present and 
of the future is the natural issue of the Chris- 
tian life. Is it possible, one is tempted to ask, 
that this confidence of the first Christian century 
can be revived in the twentieth century, when 
the tragedy of war is devastating Europe, and 
laying in ruins not its cities alone, but its Chris- 
tian ideals of faith and hope and love? 
Whither are things present leading, and what 
are to be the things to come? Are we not wit- 
nessing the bankruptcy of Christianity? Have 

167 



Religious Education or an* American Citizen 

we not been swept back into an era of barbar- 
ism, in which Christian faith has been sub- 
merged and lost? 

The first impression which one may thus 
receive of the present may well make him 
tremble for the future. Yet when one con- 
siders more closely the origins of the present 
tragedy a different conclusion may be reached. 
What is it that has brought about this cata- 
clysm? Behind all the diplomatic strategy 
and political ambition which have provoked 
the carnage, there lies a long series of moral 
wrongs, which have left their stamp on na- 
tional honor and their scars on neighboring 
States. The awful catastrophe is the inevitable 
consequence of captured provinces, broken 
treaties, and cynical aggression. Never was 
there such a fulfilment of the warning of Moses 
to the children of Israel: "Behold, ye have 
sinned against the Lord: and be sure your sin 
will find you out." Each tortuous negotiation, 
each broken pledge, now finds its delayed and 
terrific retribution. The doctrine that states- 
manship lies outside the area of the moral law 
could have, it now appears, no other conse- 
quence than this apparently uninterpretable 
war. 

If, then, the United States, as it throws its 
168 



The Expansion of Religion 

life and treasure into the abyss, is to have any 
part in the redemption of the world, it must be 
because her motives are wholly disinterested, 
her ambition wholly restrained, and her diplo- 
macy wholly open and just. If things present 
are the awful penalty for national provincialism, 
then things to come must be the world's penitent 
answer to the great command, " Seek first the 
Knigdom of God and His righteousness." The 
tragedy of these years is teaching the world that 
the greatness of nations is not in force, but in 
faith; not in wealth, but in character; not in ter- 
ritory, but in truth. If the war is the logical 
consequence of detaching a great era of life 
from the sphere of Christian duty then stable 
peace will not arrive until political action be- 
comes a part of that Christian cosmopolitanism 
which claims the promise, " All things are 
yours." 

Such is the New Testament teaching of the 
expansion of religion. One may make of his 
religion as much or as little as he may please. 
He may sidetrack it, provincialize it, depart- 
mentalize it, save himself by it; or he may ex- 
pand it, universalize it, set it to save the world; 
and the first question which any one who accepts 
the guidance of religion has to ask of himself 
is: Am I using my faith for all that it is 

169 



Religious EDUCATION OP AN American Citizen 

worth? Is it a personal privilege or is it a 
social obligation, a jewel to keep or a seed to 
sow, a provincial or a cosmopolitan possession? 
" Religion," as the Scotch teacher already cited 
has said, "prescribes no new duties; it has no 
province of its own, separate from the rest of 
life. But it gives a new significance to duty, 
and a new intensity to our aims." ' 

Much Christian teaching is still in effect social 
pessimism. It distrusts the spirit of the present 
age; it is suspicious of new learning; it hides 
itself from the movement of events as the 
monks once fled from an evil world to the se- 
curity of their cells; and the consequence of this 
habit of mind is the practical exclusion of four- 
fifths of human life from the province of re- 
ligion. The world, and life, and things pres- 
ent, and things to come, occupy a region which 
may be governed by expediency, utility, or self- 
interest; and the mind of the Church may be de- 
voted either to technical discussions of doctrine 
or to meditations on death and eternity. Re- 
ligion, thus interpreted, is like a great cathedral 
standing in the busy market-place of a Euro- 
pean town. Within is prayer, incense, worship, 
miracle. Without is trade, toil, gossip, duty. 
One may lift the heavy curtain that hangs on the 

1 Henry Jones, op. cit., p. 128. 
I70 



The Expansion of Religion 

church-door and go in to God; and lift it again 
and come out to man; but between the sacred 
and the secular the curtain hangs. Within is 
darkness and mystery; without is sunshine and 
reality; and for the most part the people sit out- 
side, in the warm sunshine of work and play, 
and leave the dim aisles of religion to the theo- 
logians, the reactionaries, and the sentimental- 
ists. Over against this religious separatism 
stands the cosmopolitanism of Christianity. 
" The field," said Jesus to the provincialism 
of his own day, " is the world." " All things 
are yours," adds Paul. Holiness, in other 
words, is but another name for wholeness. 
No life is whole that is not holy; and no life is 
holy that is not whole. 

We hear much in these days of the conserva- 
tion of our national resources, the utilization of 
the powers of nature for the work of the mod- 
ern world; and with amazing inventiveness and 
energy the waterfalls have been harnessed to 
their tasks, the deserts have bloomed into gar- 
dens, and the forests have been rescued from 
desolation and waste. Yet all the while, a nat- 
ural resource of unparalleled energy — the re- 
ligious nature of man — is left to operate in a 
corner of the world, instead of being utilized to 
the maximum of its productive power. The 

171 



Religious Education of an American ClTia 

problem of the modern Church is therefore not 
to permit its energy to be exhausted in turning 
its own wheels, or to be utilized by little people 
for little ends, but to set this vast natural re- 
source, like some great water-power, to move 
and light and warm the modern world. 

On the Canadian side of the Falls of Niagara 
stands a great power-plant from which the elec- 
tric force is conveyed half across the State of 
New York. In a great silent hall a row of dials 
indicate these vast operations, and quiet men 
pass from one dial to the next, watching to see 
whether the power works without hindrance 
hundreds of miles away. Thousands of busy 
people live and move through the utilization of 
this force, w T hile but a few inches are taken from 
the top of the Falls, and the mighty cataract 
thunders down in undiminished glory. It is a 
picture of the work of the Christian religion in 
the modern world. For centuries people have 
worshipped in the Christian name, just as people 
have come to gaze at Niagara ; but at last the 
time has come to utilize the power that has run 
to waste, and to apply its energy to the wheels 
of the world. Each quiet place of worship be- 
comes thus a power-house, where the dynamic is 
developed and from which it is transmitted; and 
far out into the waiting world, w T ith all its needs 
172 



The Expansion of Religion 

and desires and tragedies and fears, reaching in 
its mysterious course farther than can be be- 
lieved or dreamed, the stored-up energy may 
flow, not to renew one's own strength, nor for 
the sake of one sect alone, be it of Paul, or Apol- 
los, or Cephas, — but for the sake of the world, 
and life, and death, and things present, and 
things to come; and it is as though the power 
went singing along the wires: "I am come 
that all these may have my life, and may have it 
abundantly." 



173 



XI 

THE CONVERSION OF MILITARISM 

With each step in these successive chapters the 
discussion finds itself more and more over- 
whelmed by thoughts of war. It is as if a great 
cloud lifted itself above the horizon of a sunny 
day and hid from view one landmark after an- 
other in its black and threatening approach. 
Any lesson one may have to learn or teach, any 
prophecy he may make of the future, even the 
vocabulary he employs, becomes militarized. 
He cannot write of Discipline or Power or Per- 
spective without being led into illustrations from 
the army or the battlefield. Indeed, one of the 
minor effects of the war upon preachers and 
teachers of religion is the increasing sense of 
inadequacy and futility in all that they have 
hitherto had to say. A kind of homiletical 
atrophy has seized on their earlier habits of 
thought and utterance. Themes which once 
appeared to them of supreme importance now 
seem to belong to another era, or another world. 
An Oxford professor is said to have stopped 
short in his lecture on philosophy and told his 
174 



The Conversion of Militarism 

class that the thought of the war had driven 
every idea out of his mind. 

This overwhelming preoccupation with the 
tragedy of the time has reached its climax for 
American citizens through the actual partici- 
pation of their country in the conflict itself. 
The motives which have prompted the United 
States to abandon its attitude of comfortable 
neutrality and to sacrifice its life and treasure 
are as far as possible from war-like. It is to 
end war rather than to promote it that Ameri- 
cans are preparing to fight. The action they 
propose is not an expression of militarism, but a 
protest against it. All Americans are thus, in 
the strict sense of the word, pacificists, — that is 
to say, peace-makers, pledged to secure a world- 
peace, even if it must be by the stern ordeal of 
war. On the flag of the Commonwealth of 
Massachusetts is inscribed a motto which pre- 
cisely represents the American spirit in this un- 
sought and vast adventure : " Ense petit placi- 
dam sub libertate quietem" It seeks an undis- 
turbed peace, with liberty on sea and land, by 
the undesired mediation of the sword. Such 
is the only kind of war for which the American 
people could be enlisted with the passionate loy- 
alty which the crisis demands, — a war for 
peace, a crusade against militarism. 

175 



Religious Education' of ax American Citizen 

Yet the question may still be asked whether 
the spirit of militarism is altogether evil. A 
military caste, a militant nation, a " Will to 
Power," a conception of progress as dominated 
by force, — all this is indeed a blot on civiliza- 
tion and a reversion to barbarism. No end of 
the present conflict can be contemplated with 
hope which does not make an end of arrogant 
and merciless militarism. It is obvious, how- 
ever, that neither diplomacy nor discipline could 
so confidently summon a civilized nation to war, 
if there were not operating, together w r ith the 
brutal or mercenary motives of bloodshed, 
some finer elements of national character. 
War would indeed be intolerable if it were not, 
or at least did not pretend to be, the expression 
of national idealism. 

And here we come upon the secret of 
strength, and, as history w r ould seem to teach, 
of perennial vitality in the spirit of militarism. 
War is the most direct and immediate outlet 
for the splendid virtues of heroism, sacrifice, 
and patriotism. Militarism as a national creed 
becomes but another name for national honor, 
security, and unity; and for these ends any 
loyal citizen should be glad to die. On these 
lofty spiritual motives statesmen and strate- 
gists rely. They are not only dealing with 
176 



The Conversion of Militarism 

man as a fighting animal, inheriting from count- 
less generations the instinct to conquer and 
slay, but reckon also on the transmutation of 
the fighting instinct into a spiritual aim, and on 
the willingness to fight because one's country is 
threatened or one's cause is just. Motives like 
these are not to be abolished or suppressed. 
They are not only ineradicable, but they are also 
justifiable and honorable. It would be a tame, 
materialized, and selfish world which did not re- 
spond to the appeal of the heroic, the self- 
abnegating, and the sacrificial. " Militarism," 
said William James in his noble essay on 
" Moral Equivalents for War," " is the great 
preserver of our ideals of hardihood. . . . 
War represents the strong life. . . . The mili- 
tary feelings are too deeply grounded to abdi- 
cate their place until better substitutes are 
offered." 

What, then, is the problem which lies behind 
all temporary schemes for checking the passion 
of militarism, and which will confront the world 
when the immediate tragedy of the present war 
has ceased to devastate and bewilder? It is a 
problem which may be described as the Conver- 
sion of Militarism: the diverting of the military 
instinct from uses which are cruel and destruc- 
tive to uses which are creative and beneficent. 

177 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

Precisely as a natural force like electricity has 
been first worshipped in the clouds, then guarded 
against in the lightning-rod, and finally accepted 
as a perilous yet serviceable instrument of hu- 
man welfare and convenience; precisely as the 
passion of sex, which may be the curse of civi- 
lization, is none the less the constructive force 
of every loving and stable home; so the fierce 
impulses which stir nations to war have in them 
the possibilities of application to mercy instead 
of misery, to beneficence instead of ruin, to life 
instead of death. Ventures not less heroic, gal- 
lantry not less splendid, battles not less perilous, 
await men in the fields of science and service, of 
creation and redemption, than on the bloody 
plains of Belgium and Galicia. " Much re- 
mains to conquer still," said Milton to Crom- 
well, " Peace hath her victories no less renown'd 
than war." 

And how is it possible that this conversion 
of militarism may be practically secured? The 
suggestion seems at first merely fanciful. The 
tradition of bloodshed is so deeply rooted in 
the habits of the human race that it is difficult 
to think of soldiers as doing anything but 
kill, or of courage as being applicable to any- 
thing but war. Is it essential, however, to a 
hero that he should kill or be killed? Is 
178 



The Conversion of Militarism 

bloodshed the only test of bravery? Must 
courage be always associated with carnage? 
Or is it possible, among the ordinary demands 
and needs of a nation at peace, to find outlets for 
heroism, ways of the noble life, as real and per- 
haps as difficult as the courage of the trenches? 
That is the question which must be answered if 
the world, however sick at heart it may be, is 
not to permit its most gallant youths in their 
highest moods to be attacked by the fever of 
militarism, and to yield themselves to the pas- 
sions of war. 

In Professor James's prophetic Essay he pro- 
poses a daring, and — as it then seemed — a 
Utopian programme. It was nothing less than 
the universal conscription of young men of mili- 
tary age for service in an army of national de- 
fence ; but in an army which should be applied 
to the constructive service of the common good. 
They should be ordered out from their comfort- 
able and indolent lives and set to do the unwel- 
come tasks which must be done in a civilized 
community, and which might test the " hardi- 
hood of youth. " " If now," he says, " there 
were, instead of military conscription a conscrip- 
tion of the whole youthful population to form 
for a certain number of years a part of the army 
enlisted against nature, the injustice would tend 

179 



Religious Education' of an American Citizen 

to be evened out and numerous other goods to 
the Commonwealth would follow. The mili- 
tary ideals of hardihood and discipline would 
be wrought into the growing fibre of the people; 
no one would remain blind, as the luxurious 
classes now are blind, to man's real relations to 
the globe he lives on, and to the permanently 
sour and hard foundations of his higher life. 

" To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, 
to fishing fleets in December, to dishwashing, 
clothes-washing and window-washing, to road 
building and tunnel making, to foundries and 
stokeholes, and to the frames of sky-scrapers 
would our gilded youth be drafted oft, according 
to their choice, to get the childishness knocked 
out of them, and to come back into society with 
healthier sympathies and soberer ideas. They 
would have paid their blood-tax, done their own 
part in the immemorial human warfare against 
nature, they would tread the earth more 
proudly, the women w r ould value them more 
highly, they would be better fathers and teach- 
ers of the following generations. 

" Such a conscription, with the state of public 
opinion that would have required it, and the 
many moral fruits it would bear, would pre- 
serve in the midst of a pacific civilization the 
manly virtues which the military party is so 
1 80 



The Conversion of Militarism 

afraid of seeing disappear in peace. We 
should get toughness without callousness, au- 
thority with as little criminal cruelty as possible, 
and painful work done cheerily because the duty 
is temporary and threatens not, as now, to de- 
grade the whole remainder of one's life." 

When these gallant words were written, in 
19 10, they may well have seemed the imagi- 
native forecast of a speculative philosopher. 
Governmental socialism on so vast a scale, 
drafting for public service the entire body of 
American youth, must have appeared as remote 
from practical politics as it was opposed to the 
habit of free initiative so dear to the American 
mind. Yet, by the inevitable logic of events, 
the United States has found itself brought at 
least within sight of a conception of citizenship 
which may go far to realize the scheme of politi- 
cal education so graphically described. The 
" selective draft," now proposed for national 
defence, is designed, not only to enlist an ade- 
quate fighting force, but to establish the prin- 
ciple which the President of the United States 
lays down : " That there is a universal obliga- 
tion to serve, and that a public authority should 
choose those upon whom the obligation of mili- 
tary service shall rest, and also in a sense choose 
those who shall do the rest of the nation's 

181 



Religious Education op an American Citizen 

work." Such a scheme, if realized, would be 
" a mobilization of all the productive and active 
forces of the nation," in which " those should be 
chosen for service in the army who can be most 
readily spared from the prosecution of other ac- 
tivities in which the country must engage in, and 
to which it must devote a great deal of its best 
energy and capacity." Here, then, is not in- 
deed a supplanting of war by its moral equiva- 
lents, but at least a recognition that the organ- 
ization of militarism may be applied to other 
ends than war, and that there may be a soldier- 
liness of peace. It repeats in the most dramatic 
tones the expectant patriotism of William 
James. " We must make new energies and 
hardihoods to continue the manliness to which 
the military mind so faithfully clings. Martial 
virtues must be the cement; intrepidity, con- 
tempt of softness, surrender of private inter- 
ests, the rock upon which States are built." 

So far, then, we have been led toward the 
conversion of militarism. The possibility of 
moral equivalents for war has been recognized 
not as a Utopian dream, but as a proposition of 
political expediency. The State of New York, 
for example, by recent amendment of its Mili- 
tary Training Law, permits its boys from 16 to 
19 years of age to select as the equivalents of 
182 



The Conversion of Militarism 

drill and tactics " such vocational training or ex- 
perience as shall specifically prepare boys of the 
ages named for service directly useful to the 
State in the defence, the promotion of public 
safety, the conservation of the State's resources, 
or the construction and maintenance of public 
improvements." The boy, in other words, as 
he applies himself to these selected tasks of in- 
dustrial service is to regard himself as an en- 
listed soldier under orders to defend his country 
by his hands or brains, if not by his sword. 
How far this new conception of an industrial 
army is to lead us; whether the forms of mili- 
tarism are to be universally accepted in our so- 
cial order; whether, as has been lately said, 
" We can fight Germany only by reconstructing 
the United States," and " must adopt by a swift 
conversion the virtues which have been neg- 
lected in time of peace"; 1 whether, in short, 
we are to follow the lead of Great Britain in 
that vast expansion of governmental Socialism, 
of which theorists have hitherto conceived, 
but which has now been enforced with a rigor 
of which the most sanguine agitators could not 
have dreamed, — all this is as yet undetermined. 
It may be that the tradition of individualism, 
which has been so dominant in the United 

1 Neiv Republic, April 21, 1917, p. 337. 

183 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

States, will restrict the sphere of centralized 
control, or may suggest some middle path in 
which individual initiative and governmental 
guarantees may work hand in hand. Whatever 
may be the practical adjustment of these rela- 
tions between the citizen and the State in the 
various occupations essential for national de- 
fence, this at least seems a not remote possibil- 
ity: that every young American shall be con- 
sciously doing, or learning to do, something for 
his country, and be counted as a soldier enlisted 
for national defence. That would be, if not a 
complete conversion of militarism, yet a recog- 
nition that moral equivalents for war exist. In- 
deed, it might come to pass that a country, which 
in this soldierly spirit applied itself to organized 
efficiency in the arts of peace, would find that its 
industrial impregnability had secured it from 
foreign attack, and that the application of mili- 
tarism to industry had rendered superfluous its 
application to war. 

Such are some of the dramatic possibilities 
which may meet the United States as it gropes 
its way through the dark contingencies of its 
Valley of Decision to the future which is as 
yet unrevealed. It may be that militarism has 
much to teach to so undisciplined and light- 
minded a people. It may be that a new era 
184 



The Conversion of Militarism 

of public and private responsibility is not far 
away. It may be that by such enlistment 
with the allies of righteousness the prophecy 
of William James may be verified, and k ' war 
may become absurd and impossible for its own 
monstrosity," that soldierliness may be spiritu- 
alized, and the wars of the future fought, " not 
against flesh and blood, but against the dark- 
ness of this world, against spiritual wickedness 
in high places." 

There remains, however, another aspect of 
this conversion of militarism which these specu- 
lations about the future must not lead one to 
forget. Interesting as it may be to contemplate 
the possibility of conscription applied to indus- 
try, it must be admitted that this regeneration 
of the world by forced draft is not likely to 
occur without delay. It is not unlike those Uto- 
pian anticipations of a perfect commonwealth 
w T hich have haunted the minds of social philoso- 
phers from Sir Thomas More to Edward Bel- 
lamy, but which have been more successful in 
literature than in life. The tremendous exigen- 
cies of war may encourage a temporary consent 
to this enormous extension of governmental au- 
thority; but with the return of peace the inclina- 
tion in the American character for free initia- 
tive may reassert itself. A system of conscrip- 

i8 5 



Religious Education op am American Citizen 

tion does not as yet present to the American 
mind an alluring picture of the future of de- 
mocracy. 

But how is it meantime with life as it now 
is, and with the ordinary vocations of a world 
at peace? Must the conversion of militarism 
wait for conscription? Is there no chance for 
the heroic life until young men are compelled 
to lead it? Are there not risks as dramatic, 
and sacrifices as splendid, confronting young 
men in the ordinary callings of modern life as 
are now meeting soldiers in the trenches? Is 
not, in short, the conversion of militarism ac- 
tually illustrated in the daily duties of common 
men, who may be quite unaware that they are 
enlisted as soldiers, and whose heroism may be 
disguised by the undramatic appearance of their 
tasks? To reassure oneself of this soldierli- 
ness already applied to works of peace would 
be to regain one's faith in the American char- 
acter, and even to promote the hope that hero- 
ism by conscription may be some day succeeded 
by the unconstrained heroism of citizenship. 
In Professor James's prophecy he makes a pass- 
ing allusion to this voluntary system of soldier- 
liness. " The martial type," he says, " can be 
bred without war. Priests and medical men are 
in a fashion educated to it." Is there not in 
186 



The Conversion of Militarism 

this allusion the suggestion of a general truth? 
Is not the martial type more widely distributed 
than is generally observed? May not any 
calling be dignified by the discipline and sacri- 
fices of soldierliness? Are not, in fact, great 
numbers of lives actually, even though uncon- 
sciously, enlisted in this moral militarism: 

l( Glad hearts, without reproach or blot, 
Who do Thy work and know it not." 

The most obvious instance of this converted 
heroism is one of those to which Professor 
James refers. A practising physician goes his 
way, earning his living and serving his commun- 
ity, with little thought that he is a hero ; yet the 
most modest doctor may be called, any day, to 
risks and ventures as perilous as in a crisis of 
war. An epidemic sw r eeps through the town, 
scourging its homes with some infectious dis- 
ease; and while the flags of alarm are hung be- 
fore the house-doors, and the neighbors hurry 
by, the doctor does not for a moment hesitate 
or retreat. It is a part of his daily work to 
enter and serve, and he proceeds with his task 
without thinking of himself or being regarded 
by his neighbors as a soldier. 

A little girl, for example, is brought into 
a hospital, suffering from diphtheria, and a tube 

187 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

is inserted in her throat to relieve the breath- 
ing. The tube becomes clogged, and a young 
medical assistant without an instant's hesitation 
puts his own mouth to the tube, sucks away the 
membrane, and dies of diphtheria himself. It 
is simply a risk involved in his professional duty, 
the conversion of the military instinct from the 
taking of life to the saving of it. 

A more distinguished illustration of this pro- 
fessional heroism was offered in the war against 
yellow fever. This dread disease had through- 
out the history of the United States ravaged its 
Southern communities. Ninety-five epidemics 
had occurred during the nineteenth century. 
Then, in the year 1900, three assistant-surgeons 
of the United States Army, with some enlisted 
men, undertook to determine whether the dis- 
ease was conveyed by contagion or by some in- 
sect-carrier. They exposed themselves to infec- 
tion, but without harm. Then with scientific 
tranquillity they permitted mosquitoes, which 
had previously fed on yellow-fever patients, to 
bite them. One of the surgeons died; and two 
of the private soldiers developed the disease, 
and on recovery refused all pecuniary reward, 
exhibiting, as their commander said, u a moral 
courage never surpassed in the annals of the 
army of the United States." It was an achieve- 
188 



The Conversion of Militarism 

ment of soldierliness to be ranked with the 
greatest victories of war. The vast enterprise 
of the Panama Canal is as much a result of free- 
ing the Isthmus from yellow-fever as of engi- 
neering skill, and as truly a monument of Assist- 
ant-Surgeons Reed and Lazear as of General 
Goethals and General Gorgas. Of Reed it 
was said by General Wood, " I know no man 
who has done so much for humanity"; and on 
the monument to Lazear are the words, " With 
more than the courage of a soldier he risked 
and lost his life to show how the ravages of a 
fearful pestilence might be prevented." 

Such is the soldierliness of science. And 
there is a further quality in it which increases its 
heroism. It is the absence of publicity or ap- 
plause. The courage of the soldier is sustained 
by companionship; he feels the touch of elbows; 
he anticipates glory, promotion, a decoration on 
his breast. But the heroism of science may 
have no companionship but a microscope, and 
the risks it encounters may be but a part of 
daily routine. A medical missionary at a sta- 
tion in central China was waylaid by the Boxers, 
and in defending his wife was slashed on the 
arm and leg. He was carried two days in a 
cart to the river and to the coast, and then to 
England, where the tendons of his wrist were 

189 



Religious Education op an American Cito 

sewed. Forthwith he and his wife, without 
hesitation or consciousness of merit, quietly re- 
turned to their station and proceeded with the 
healing of the very men who had attacked and 
wounded him. Does not such conduct deserve 
to be called soldierly? May it not be as brave 
to cure as it is to kill? Are not dirt and igno- 
rance, stupidity and cowardice, as firmly en- 
trenched and as hard to dislodge as a battery 
behind barbed wire? If it needs courage to 
take up the sword, may it not take equal courage 
to take up the sword of the spirit? Is it not 
time, then, that the possibilities of peace, the 
drama of routine, the risks of daily duty, were 
accepted as fields for heroism, and that the great 
names of modern history should be, not alone 
of those who have desolated countries and 
slaughtered enemies, but of those who by crea- 
tive sacrifice have earned promotion in the ar- 
mies of peace? 

Nor is this soldierliness a monopoly of pro- 
fessional or distinguished men alone. The 
same story may be told of very humble ways of 
service and in the most commonplace of lives. 
A steel-worker sweating before his furnace; a 
locomotive engineer holding his throttle and 
peering out into the night; a miner groping his 
way through poisonous fumes; a mother bend- 
190 



The Conversion of Militarism 

ing over her sick child, — these are not unusual 
occurrences, but so familiar that one may over- 
look their nobility and turn elsewhere for heroes 
or saints. Some workmen were resting one 
day in the noon-hour at a steel-plant, when a 
young Irishman named Lacy noticed that a rivet 
in the waste-gas pipe was giving way. " Get 
out, boys," cried Lacy, " I'll hold it back." But 
one of his companions turned to help him. It 
was Peter Moncilochi, an old man and an Ital- 
ian. Both of them collapsed, while their 
twenty-three companions escaped; and the Irish 
boy and the Italian veteran verified together 
the soldierly saying, " Greater love hath no man 
than this, that a man lay down his life for his 
friends." 

Such incidents are, indeed, quite as likely 
to occur among plain people as among those 
whose luxury and comfort have tempted them 
to think first of themselves. Much kindly 
service is offered by the prosperous to the poor, 
and blesses both those who give and those who 
take; but for pure and self-forgetful tender- 
heartedness one may turn with confidence to 
those who have little to give except neighborli- 
ness, time and sympathy. A baby lies sick in 
the tenement, and both parents must work all 
day. The visitor from the Settlement gives 

191 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

what help she can through the day, but the 
strain is at night, when the parents must sleep or 
lose their job. So the neighbors in the tene- 
ment take turns in watching, and with no sense 
of sacrifice the rough-handed men take the hard 
hours of dawn and then steal away to their 
work. 

In short, there is hidden away in the most 
prosaic lives a fund, larger than they them- 
selves are apt to know, of moral capital which 
can be drawn on when needed, and which en- 
riches and sustains their self-respect. To util- 
ize that deposit of magnanimity, to enlist in that 
army of self-effacing service, to find an outlet 
for soldierliness in mercy instead of murder, — 
that is the great discovery which the world must 
make if it is to satisfy those instincts which have 
hitherto expressed themselves in war. It may 
be urged that this also, like Professor James's 
plan of conscription, is a Utopian scheme of so- 
cial morality; but the lessons of the present time 
are teaching us that one or the other of two 
difficult alternatives must be chosen: either 
the attempting of the apparently impossible or 
the submitting to the positively unendurable. 
As an English student of the war has said: 
" The enemy of all our peace is the man who 
by word or tone or gesture depresses hope, or 
192 



The Conversion of Militarism 

defers Utopia to a distant future. . . . This 
war has taught us that our choice lies between 
Utopia and Hell." * 

Such, then, is the conversion of militarism, 
the transmutation of the virtues of the soldier 
into their spiritual equivalents. Even in the 
world as it now is, much degraded by self-seek- 
ing, overshadowed by the terrors of war, and 
even without recourse to social or governmental 
compulsion, there is already possible a magna- 
nimity of common life, a constructive soldierli- 
ness, which may perpetuate the " hardihood " 
of the fighter without the stain of blood. The 
spirit of militarism cannot be extirpated, but it 
can be converted, and that conversion of mili- 
tarism is the cause which, after the call to arms 
has been obeyed, will summon the future to a 
new Crusade. 

In such a view of life there is, however, 
more than a new ethics or a finer patriotism. 
When one speaks of a crusade, he remembers 
the cross of Christ, and finds himself describ- 
ing a religious not less than a moral conver- 
sion. The new demand is not only laid on 
an American as a citizen, but it is also a part 
of his religious education. For when one 

1 H. N. Brailsford, The War of Steel and Gold, Macmillan, 
i^, P- 332. 

193 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

turns back from these lessons of war to the 
teaching of the New Testament, he finds that 
this same translation of the soldier's habit of 
mind into the language of faith is one of the 
most characteristic aspects of the Gospel of 
Jesus Christ. It is often asked in these days 
whether Jesus was for peace at any price; and 
many Christian disciples have accepted the ideal 
of a submissive, resigned and non-resistant 
Christ. Yet it is only necessary to recall the 
preceding chapters of this little book, in which 
religious education has been repeatedly brought 
face to face with the teaching of Jesus, in order 
to correct this superficial impression. Disci- 
pline, Power, Perspective, — these are attri- 
butes not of weakness but of strength. It is 
true that Jesus was a sufferer; but it is not less 
true that he was a soldier. He surrendered 
much in order to conquer more. He could send 
his disciples forth without purse or scrip; but 
again he could say, " He that hath no sword, 
let him sell his garment and buy one." Prince 
of Peace as he was, he scourged the traders, he 
defied the Pharisees, he rebuked Pilate on his 
throne, and he died for a cause that seemed lost, 
as a soldier dies in a charge. When the Apos- 
tle Paul described the Christian life, he also was 
led to use the language of militarism. " To 
194 



The Conversion of Militarism 

war a good warfare " ; " to fight a good fight of 
faith " ; " to be a good soldier of Jesus Christ " ; 
that " one might please him who hath chosen 
him to be a soldier," — such was the Apostolic 
definition of discipleship. 

In a word, the teaching of the New Testa- 
ment concerning the conduct of life finds its 
dominant note in that spiritualization of sol- 
dierliness and Christianization of courage, 
which accomplish the conversion of militarism. 
" I am not come," said Jesus, to destroy, 
but to fulfil." That was his way with all the 
impulses and habits of life which had in them 
the possibility of good. He came, not to de- 
stroy the fighting instinct, but to fulfil it; not 
to rob life of heroism, but to give a new scope 
and significance to the heroic life; not to pro- 
claim a moral disarmament, but to bid his fol- 
lowers put on the whole armor of God; to mo- 
bilize the forces of righteousness and call them 
to the colors of God. That is the New Testa- 
ment way of delivery from the horrors of war. 
Permanent emancipation from the militarism 
which kills must be secured through the conver- 
sion of militarism for the campaigns which save. 



195 



XII 

THE PLACE OF JESUS CHRIST IN A RELIGIOUS 
EXPERIENCE 

Each step in this series of reflections on relig- 
ious education brings one nearer to a single per- 
sonality and influence. It is as though one's 
thought had revolved in the circumference of 
life, and was finally drawn as by some law of 
spiritual attraction toward a single centre. 
Each line of discussion or description, as it has 
been followed to its interior meaning, has led 
to some aspect of the teaching or example of 
Jesus Christ. Not as a theological assumption 
or as an ecclesiastical demand, but as a logical 
and inevitable point toward which all these vari- 
ous considerations move, as one passes from the 
circle of his thought to its centre, there is redis- 
covered the interpretative power of that teach- 
ing; and one's own conclusions converge from 
their various interests on that interior authority. 
It may indeed happen that these radii of com- 
munication are followed outward rather than in- 
ward. A life may enter, first of all, into inti- 
196 



Jesus Christ in a Religious Experience 

macy with Jesus Christ, and then from that 
centre proceed along one or another line of 
thought or action until it reach the circumfer- 
ence of the modern world. The great major- 
ity of Christian disciples have undoubtedly gone 
this way. The teaching of their Master has 
moulded their own lives, and then the world 
and its problems have become interpretable and 
significant. Either way, however, whether it 
be of deduction from the influence of Jesus 
Christ, or induction from the conduct of life, 
brings one — if it be followed through — to 
the same result. That which Christianizes re- 
ligious education is the bond between circumfer- 
ence and centre. Let the radius be straight and 
bind the two ends together, and one may go in- 
ward or outward with the same assurance. A 
modern life, as it interprets its own problems, is 
led inward to the teaching of Jesus; and the 
teaching of Jesus, followed outward, brings one 
to his immediate duty in the modern world. 
The road between Christian loyalty and moral 
efficiency is not a " one-way street." It is a 
high-road, which one may travel either way. 
It is not so important to determine where to 
start, as it is to find the Way. Jesus Christ 
may be either the beginning of a religious ex- 
perience, or the end of it. The religious educa- 

197 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

tion of an American citizen is not a fixed cur- 
riculum, but an elective system. 

As, therefore, at the end of this series of 
chapters, the personality of Jesus Christ comes 
into clearer view, and its place in a religious 
experience is to be determined, it is not essen- 
tial that this place should be defined for all 
time and for all men in the same terms, or 
approached by all in the same way. It is not 
a question of orthodox Christology, but of per- 
sonal intimacy. It is not necessary to prescribe 
how that intimacy shall be reached, if only it be 
reached at all. Whether light shall reach the 
eye directly or by reflection is not important 
so long as one has light enough to see. 
Whether the Way leads from life to faith or 
from faith to life is not important so long as 
the Way is found and followed. All that one 
can offer of guidance to another is to tell 
which way he has been led and to report that 
the path is open. In short, the place of Jesus 
Christ in a religious experience is not neces- 
sarily fixed where the theologians affirm that 
it should be, but rather at that point where 
in the actual course of life it has been in reality 
found. It is a matter not for profession, but 
for confession. If one is to speak at all of so 
intimate and personal a relationship, he must 
198 



Jesus Christ in a Religious Experience 

abandon argument and turn to testimony. His 
Christian confession must be an Apologia pro 
vita sua. 

Such an Apologia may begin by recalling 
what religion means, and what are the various 
types of religious experience which may be de- 
scribed or defined. Three functions of con- 
sciousness, the philosophers tell us, — Thought 
Feeling, and Will — though intermingling and 
co-operative in their operations, may be, in the- 
ory at least, discriminated; and each of the three 
has seemed to many students the seat of the re- 
ligious life. The Rationalist defines religion 
in terms of the reason; he thinks God's thoughts 
after Him. Religion, he repeats with Hegel, 
is " the finite spirit's knowledge of its own con- 
sciousness as Absolute Spirit." The penetra- 
tion of the Reason through the contradictions of 
the finite world to the unity of the Absolute 
Spirit is a direct assurance to a being whose 
peculiar nature is found in his rational life. 
The Mystic, on the other hand, discovers a 
depth and universality in the realm of feeling 
which delivers him from the aristocracy of the 
rationalist and associates him with the democ- 
racy of the emotional life. " The measure of 
knowledge," he says with Schleiermacher, " is 
not the measure of piety." " Your feeling, in 

199 



Religious Education of am American ClTM 

so far as it expresses the universal life you 
share, is your religion." Finally, there enters 
into this great debate the teaching of the Kthical 
Idealist, recalling attention to the function of 
the will, and finding a way to God through the 
sense of obligation and obedience. The Cate- 
gorical Imperative of Kant, which compels his 
reverence for the moral law as for the stars in 
the heavens; the voice of conscience which 
Fichte heard in the soul " as the channel 
through which God's influence descends on 
man "; the " great redemption," — to use Mar- 
tineau's words, — " which converts the life of 
duty into the life of love," — all these doctrines 
of ethical philosophy open a third path, which 
runs through conscience to conviction, through 
decision to insight, through loyalty to piety, and 
makes of obedience, as Robertson said, an 
" organ of spiritual knowledge." 

When one turns from these divisive and often 
contentious conclusions of the philosophers to 
the teaching of Jesus Christ, the first thing 
which impresses one is its many-sidedness and 
universality. All three of these sects of philos- 
ophy, the rationalists, the mystics, and the moral 
idealists, find their doctrines anticipated and 
confirmed in the word and work of Jesus. The 
reach and depth of his thought, his intellectual 
200 



Jesus Christ in a Religious Experience 

attitude toward the Eternal, his insight into na- 
ture and beauty, into fallacious reasoning and 
the significance of the insignificant, would have 
given him a place among the world's greatest 
thinkers if another destiny had not awaited him. 
' Ye shall know the truth," he says, in words 
which remain the supreme maxim of the ration- 
alist, " and the truth shall make you free." 
" Every one that is of the truth heareth my 
voice." Sayings like these commend the 
Teacher to that great number of inquirers in all 
centuries since who have looked for a rational 
interpretation of the life of God in the mind of 
man. 

Yet not less reassuring is the story of Jesus 
to the experience of the mystic. The descent 
of the Holy Spirit upon the maturing soul; 
the immediate communion with God; the intui- 
tive vision; the transfiguration of experience: 
all these marks of the ministry of Jesus illus- 
trate what the literature of mysticism calls the 
11 illuminated life " or the " transcendental 
consciousness," which reappears in religious 
history all the way from St. Francis to George 
Fox. Each monastic vision or mediaeval ec- 
stasy, each contemplative quietude or emotional 
revival which Christian history recalls, has 
been fortified by the emotional intimacy of the 

201 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

heart of Jesus with the Heart of the world. 

There remains, however, that aspect of the 
Gospels of which neither the rationalist nor the 
mystic takes adequate account. It is the dedica- 
tion of the will of Jesus to do the will of Him 
that sent him, and his summons to discipline, 
power and decision. Here, beyond dispute, 
was the fundamental note of the gospel of 
Christ. Great disclosures of truth were made 
by him to the reason, great exaltations of the 
emotions mark the crises of his career; but the 
first call of Jesus to his disciples was not to a 
Christological definition or to a transcendental 
vision, but to an ethical decision, a practical dis- 
cipleship, a dedication of the will. " Follow 
me," he says, " take up thy cross, and follow." 
" Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, 
Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; 
but he that doeth the will of my Father which is 
in heaven." " Why call ye me, Lord, Lord, 
and do not the things which I say? " The Ser- 
mon on the Mount is a discourse of practical 
ethics, a searching of the will, a judgment of 
conduct. " By their fruits ye shall know 
them." " Depart from me, ye that work in- 
iquity." 

In this teaching there may not be the pro- 
foundest part of the Gospel, or even to many 
202 



Jesus Christ in a Religious Experience 

minds its most appealing message. The satis- 
faction of the reason may be a deeper, and the 
illumination of the emotions a richer, fulfilment 
of man's communion with God. Ethical loyalty 
may be too obvious and unsophisticated to sat- 
isfy those who crave an exceptional, esoteric, or 
privileged admission to the religious life. The 
Sermon on the Mount may be to many readers 
less sublime than the Gospel of John. Yet it 
is evident that the primary test of discipleship is 
in the discipline of the will. Not theological 
orthodoxy or mystic illumination, but the spiritu- 
alization and purification of conduct are the es- 
sence of the Christian gospel. The primary 
organ of religious education is the Will. 

What, then, is the meaning of this diversity of 
impression which may be derived from the sin- 
gle life of Jesus? Must it be maintained that a 
choice should be made between these different 
views? Is the record so ambiguous that Chris- 
tians are involved in an unending debate con- 
cerning the terms of discipleship? Is Christ di- 
vided? On the contrary, it is precisely at this 
point that one comes into view of the richness 
and comprehensiveness of the Gospel. Jesus is 
too many-sided in his influence to be interpreted 
by a single psychological principle. He is 
equally accessible to the mind, the emotions and 

203 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

the will. The rationalist, the mystic, and the 
idealist find themselves on converging paths as 
they approach him. The finest subtlety of 
thought is encouraged by the mysteries of 
Christology; the highest vision of the mystic is 
anticipated in the experience of Jesus; the moral 
idealism of conduct is the condition of disciple- 
ship. The Christian life is not partial, depart- 
mental, segregated; but comprehensive, integ- 
ral, complete. It invites all the faculties of the 
spiritual life to co-operate in its interpretation. 
It sees things steadily and sees them whole. 

These hasty reflections on the psychology of 
religion, and on the relation of the personality 
of Jesus to its various types, open the way for a 
personal confession, which may not reproduce 
what is invariable, or even w T hat is normal, in 
the history of a soul; but which may suggest 
something of the rich diversity of operations 
which the one Spirit may employ. Is it not pos- 
sible, and indeed probable, that in the course of 
a religious experience of many years one may 
be permitted to try in succession all three of 
these ways of approach to Christian discipleship 
which have been abstractly described? 

A youthful mind, waked by the influence of 
parents, preachers, and teachers to thoughts 
about religion, is likely to be immediately con- 
204 



Jesus Christ in a Religious Experience 

fronted by theological definitions and denomi- 
national differences, and to attempt at once its 
own intellectual adjustment. The period when 
childhood passes into youth is one of mental as 
well as physical puberty. The boy is temper- 
amentally a rationalist. Religion is as yet 
largely unassimilated and external. It comes 
to him from the pulpit, from books, from 
teachers, and he demands of it the evidence 
of reality and consistency. He asks more ques- 
tions than the wisest can answer. He treasures 
the text: "Prove all things, hold fast that 
which is good." He has the self-confidence of 
a primitive intellectualism. 

Then by a transition which is at once physi- 
cal, intellectual, and spiritual, through the en- 
richment of experience, the appeal of poetry, 
the appreciation of beauty, the enjoyment of the 
universe, the youth may be led into the Mystic 
Way. The great and lovely company of those 
who have found God through immediate com- 
munion, from the Apostle John to the Apostle 
Emerson, call him to their companionship and 
emancipate him from the bonds of rationalism. 
Supreme among the mystics is the same Jesus 
whose nature he had tried so crudely to de- 
pict; and discipleship becomes emotionally re- 
vived and confirmed. The range of religious 

205 



Relicious Education of an American Crra 

fellowship extends itself. The modern mysti- 
cism of Martineau becomes verified by the medi- 
aeval mysticism of Tauler and the Theologia 
Gcrmanica. Fox's " Journal " speaks the same 
language as Browning's " Christmas Eve." 
Emerson speaks to his new disciples: " Within 
man is the soul of the Holy, the wise Silence, the 
universal Beauty, the Eternal One." Channing 
and Martineau reveal themselves, behind their 
contributions to theology, as at heart mystics. 
Of the first it was said by a kindred spirit in 
England: " The master-light of all his seeing 
was the spiritual relation of himself and of 
every man to God "; and Martineau, in a rare 
moment of self-confession, wrote of himself: 
" Steeped in empirical and necessarian modes of 
thought I served out successive terms of willing 
captivity to Locke and Hartley, to Collins, Ed- 
wards and Priestley, to Bentham and James 
Mill, and became a logical prig in whom I am 
humbled to recognize myself." Very remote 
from this early rationalism was the permanent 
abiding-place of Martineau's lofty spirit. He 
set, as he said, " his affirmation of God, not on 
the shifting alluvial slope of history, but on the 
rooted rock which belongs to the structure of 
the world." "There is, 1 ' he added, " a close 
affinity, perhaps identity, between religion and 
206 



Jesus Christ en a Religious Experience 

poe: Historian and metaphysician as he 

was, his rinal place in the history of thought is 
secured by his reiterated confession of direct 
and immediate communion of the life of man 
with the Spirit of God. No religious experi- 
ence, it may be safely said, is likely to be ade- 
quate or secure, unless at some point in its 
spiritual evolution it recognizes its affinity with 
the great company — Christian and extra-Chris- 
tian — who have walked rirmly. — and often 
with great solitariness of spirit. — along the 
Mystic Way. 

How, or when, it shall happen that a further 
transition from rationalism and mysticism to a 
third period of religious experience may occur, 
it is difficult to anticipate or determine. Per- 
haps the physiological processes of advancing 
age may bring with them a decreasing : 
dence in reasoning and a slackening of emo- 
tional vitality. Perhaps, on the other hand, 
the larger experience of life may make one less 
conndent in argument and less dominated by 
feeling. Whatever may have been the causes 
of the transition, it has happened to so many 
lives as to be reasonably regarded as a normal 
and trustworthy change, that as the p ersona lity 
of Jesus reasserts its claim to the loyalty of later 
years, one finds himself less concerned either 

207 



Religious Education' of AN Ambucan Citizln 

for theological precision or for mystic exalta- 
tion, and more conscious of the primary demand 
of Jesus for the dedication of the will, the dis- 
cipline of duty, the education of conscience, the 
elementary summons: "Follow me; take up 
thy cross and follow." 

As one thus surveys the theological dispu- 
tations of the modern world, he finds himself, 
not indeed failing in animated interest for a 
rational creed, but impressed with the limita- 
tions of its consequences. It becomes obvious 
that one might with entire conviction assent to 
all the articles of all the creeds and not be a 
Christian. Not one of the historic creeds of 
the Church pledges a disciple to a consistent 
Christian life. One might accept all their ma- 
jestic propositions without committing himself 
to honor or chastity or self-sacrifice. One 
might believe in the Virgin birth of Jesus 
without being thereby constrained to be born 
again. One might believe in the resurrection 
of the body as a miracle without presenting his 
own body as a living sacrifice. The creeds rep- 
resent the intellectual struggle of centuries, not 
so much to create discipleship, as to interpret it. 
They are an effort of the reason to trudge with 
patient steps along the way which the wings of 
the will have covered in an unhindered flight. 
208 



Jesus Christ in a Religious Experience 

One may expect, therefore, diversity in the 
creeds. He has no controversy with any. 
They are the best which the human mind has 
achieved in its interpretation of God and man. 
He claims fellowship with all. He believes in 
the Holy Catholic Church and in the Com- 
munion of Saints. But to confuse intellectual 
definition with personal dedication; to substitute 
dogma for life, or sacrament for sacrifice, or 
institutional Christianity for personal religion, 
is, it now seems to him, to miss the fundamental 
note of the Gospel of Christ, and to hear again 
the solemn irony of Jesus: "Not every one 
that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into 
the kingdom of heaven." 

Is it not precisely this intellectualized con- 
ception of Christianity which has now reached 
its awful Nemesis in Europe? Christianity as 
an institution, an organization, a political factor, 
a State within a State, has had full control of 
every nation in western Europe; and it has 
proved impotent to check the madness of mili- 
tarism. It may be confidently maintained that 
the religion of external dictation, dogmatic 
authority, and governmental oversight, has 
reached the end of its influence on the lives of 
thoughtful men. Yet nothing is more obvious 
than the fact that a new necessity and oppor- 

209 



Religious Education or am American Citizen 

tunity has arrived for the religion of the Will. 
The voice of the Church may be silenced; but 
the call of Jesus is heard as never before. The 
nations have put a social institution in the place 
of a social consecration; they have trusted a 
hierarchy instead of a higher morality; and the 
failure of Christianity as a form of government 
may be the disclosure some day — God grant it 
may be soon! — of Christianity as a way of 
life. 

If, however, the religion of dogma becomes 
inadequate to support the experiences of one's 
later years, neither can one find the place of 
Jesus in mystic communion alone. We hear 
much in these days of the subordination of the 
Teacher of Nazareth to the vision of an Eter- 
nal Christ. We are told that the kernel of the 
New Testament is to be found, not in the plain 
narrative of the Synoptic Gospels, but in the 
emotional exaltation reported in the Epistles. 
The Gospels, it is said, " exhibit an incomplete 
situation, a raw audience, and an inchoate con- 
text of evidence." " It is in the Epistles that we 
have the essence of Christianity." Is it not ob- 
vious that this neo-Christian mysticism defeats 
its own purpose? Does it not sacrifice histo- 
ricity to orthodoxy, and in order to understand 
Jesus maintain, with dubious loyalty, that Jesus 
210 



Jesus Christ in a Religious Experience 

did not understand himself? Mystical com- 
munion with the Eternal Christ may, it is true, 
be a support of self-sacrificing discipleship; but 
the same emotion may be — and often has been 
— a way of refuge from immediate duty, a self- 
indulgent monasticism, or even a sensual de- 
light. The justification of Christian mysticism, 
as of Christian theology, must be found in its 
ethical efficiency. 

One is brought, then, as his life is prolonged, 
to what may seem a most elementary confession 
concerning the place which Jesus finally holds in 
a religious experience; yet it is the place which 
he himself in many of his most characteristic 
sayings seems to accept. " Why call ye me, 
Lord, Lord," he says, " and do not the things 
which I say?" " Many will say to me, . . . 
Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy 
name? . . . and then will I profess unto them, 
I never knew you." " Whosoever heareth these 
sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken 
him unto a wise man, which built his house upon 
a rock." " Come, ye blessed of my Father, in- 
herit the kingdom prepared for you from the 
foundation of the world. Inasmuch as ye have 
done it unto one of the least of these my breth- 
ren, ye have done it unto me." " Whosoever 
shall do the will of God, the same is my 

211 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

brother, and my sister, and my mother/' 1 low 
simple, how uncomplicated, how universally 
practicable, is the way thus opened before a 
modern life ! How strange it seems that any 
other test of fellowship should ever have been 
regarded as essential or as sufficient! Here 
is room for a discipleship of Jesus which is 
not dependent on theological orthodox) 7 , or re- 
served for mystical illumination, but which is 
accessible to wise and simple alike, to the child's 
first experiments in obedience and the old man's 
final summary of life. Here is a habit of mind 
which does not deny or depreciate either think- 
ing or feeling, but finds in them the instruments 
and interpreters of loyalty. Here is the plain, 
though steep and stony, path of personal con- 
secration; the welcome of the promise that he 
who has the will to do the will shall know of the 
teaching. 

And is it said that this is too elementary a 
relationship to be the fulfilment of a religious 
life; that it marks the beginning rather than 
the end of Christian experience; that it in- 
dicates, not a growth to maturity but rather 
a reversion to second childhood? On the 
contrary, the final satisfaction in this transi- 
tion from a dogmatic or a mystical disciple- 
ship is in its restoration of reality, its sim- 

212 



Jesus Christ in a Religious Experience 

plification of the religious life, its emergence 
from the perplexing paths of theology and the 
slippery foothold of mysticism to a standing- 
ground of assurance and efficiency, the conver- 
sion of faith from a dogma or a feeling to an 
attitude of the will. It is, no doubt, to issue at 
the end where one began, in the simple answer 
to the initial summons: "Follow me"; but 
that answer of the will is now amplified and en- 
riched by all the experiences of life, by joys and 
sorrows, by disasters and disciplines, by disap- 
pointments and dreams, so that the following is 
at once harder and easier, more complex in its 
demands yet more compelling in its persuasion. 
One can wait for further disclosures to the rea- 
son, and for more intimate emotional com- 
munion with the mysteries of God, if only the 
way one should go is plain and the wandering 
from it less alluring. 

I have spoken of this approach to Christian 
experience as the ascending of a hill from 
various sides. That, however, is not a true 
picture; for the path upward is continuous 
and one; a winding way, a spiral ascent, up 
which the Guide encourages one to go, from 
the first dedication of the will, rising to suc- 
cessive points of intellectual clarification and 
emotional exaltation, but brought round again, 

213 



Religious Education of an American Citizen 

as one climbs, to the same point at which the 
path began, only higher up, with a broader pros- 
pect and a less clouded view. The process is 
life-long; but its horizon widens and at the end 
the view of the whole of life lies at one's feet. 
Below there was much underbrush of contention 
and doubt, much missing of the way in intellec- 
tual darkness or in mystic fog. Above there is 
a clearer sky, and the diverse creeds take their 
places in the landscape of thought, and the mists 
of mysticism soften the view; and however 
humbled one may be by failure to reach the real 
summit, and however clearly he sees above him 
higher heights of unattained loyalty, he at least 
feels about him the tranquillity and exhilaration 
of the upper air; and the Friend whom he has 
followed points, out beyond the controversies of 
the theologians and the visions of the mystics, 
the far Country, now plainly visible, to wmich 
runs the straight, though long and rugged, road 
of a Religious Education. 



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BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

The Approach to the 
Social Question 

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF SOCIAL 
ETHICS 

Decorated cloth covers, gilt top, $1.25. Macmillan 
Standard Library, $.50 

"Like the City of God in the book of Revelation, the 
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BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

Jesus Christ and the 
Christian Character 

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"One of the most striking features of modern addresses 
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The Religion of an 
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Jesus Christ and the 
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The Christian Life 
in the Modern World 



Bv FRANCIS G. PKABODY 
Author of "Jesus Christ and the Social Question," etc. 

Cloth, 121)10, $1.25 

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God, the Invisible King 

By 11. G. WELLS 

i2mo, $1.25 

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